Pakistanis View U.S. Aid Warily

October 7, 2009, 11:00 am
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/pakistanis-view-us-aid-warily/?ref=global-home

By Salman Masood

Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Ali Rizvi, left, and Umair Anjum outside a McDonald’s in Islamabad. The men say the Kerry-Lugar aid bill will undermine Pakistan’s sovereignty.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — As the Obama administration weighs a shift in its military strategy in Afghanistan, it is also stepping up its efforts to increase aid to neighboring Pakistan. The Senate on Sept. 24 approved legislation to triple nonmilitary aid to Pakistan to about $1.5 billion a year for the next five years. However, conditions laid out in the bill, authored by Senators John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, have unleashed street protests and a flood of criticism from Pakistanis who say the bill compromises their country’s sovereignty.

President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan has agreed to the stipulations in the Kerry-Lugar bill, but he is coming under sharp criticism from opposition parties and many Pakistanis who view America as a cavalier and condescending ally. Pakistan’s Parliament is discussing the Kerry-Lugar aid bill Wednesday, and it is expected to be a fiery debate.

I spoke with several Pakistanis who shared their concerns about the bill and America’s relationship with Pakistan.


Enver Baig, 63, a former senator, said he felt that America needed to change how it has treated Pakistan and its democratic governments. “We always loved the Americans, but they deserted us soon after the first Afghan war,” he said. “Since then, the trust is gone. It is time to rebuild that trust, but with the introduction of Kerry-Lugar bill, distance between America and Pakistan is increasing because of some severe conditions in the aid package.”


Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Enver Baig says the “trust is gone” between Pakistan and America.
Mr. Baig said. “There is an impression that America wants to micro-manage everything in Pakistan,” he added.

Mr. Baig said he thought the Pakistani government had poorly negotiated draft of the aid bill and instead of asking for aid, which he thought was “peanuts,” the government should have asked that previous loans from the United States be “written off.”

“There is a lot of pressure on the government to get this bill reviewed,” he said. “There are serious reservations with the country’s armed forces as well because the aid package puts curbs and conditions on them in various ways and means. I am sure the armed forces will approach the government and convey their reservations.”

He suggested three things that the United States could do to win over the Pakistani people: It could improve the aid package, increase market access to Pakistani products and have more interaction with the country’s public, politicians and opinion makers.

Umair Anjum, 21, and Ali Rizvi, 22, who said they were studying to be accountants, sat outside a McDonald’s, enjoying a cigarette and the early October breeze. Their views reflected how many urban, educated, English-speaking young Pakistanis view the relationship between their country and America.

“Pakistanis hate America, to some extent because you don’t bomb an ally,” Mr. Rizvi said. “People here do not like the drone attacks. They are important in the war against terror, all right, but America should respect our sovereignty.”

Mr. Anjum said he felt Pakistan was routinely betrayed by the United States. The Kerry-Lugar bill, he said, “is bound to undermine our sovereignty in every possible way. The Americans are trying to dictate us in every walk of life. America is working against our interests. It is promoting India, which has a huge presence in Afghanistan. Our armed forces and people should act like Iran and stand up to American pressure.”

The young men also said that employees from private security firms such as Blackwater were operating with impunity inside Pakistan.

“There are thousands of Blackwater operatives in the country now if you go by the media reports,” Mr. Anjum said. “They have been given a license to kill. They are not accountable to anyone here. Would India allow Blackwater on its territory? Not at all.”

Mr. Rizvi said simply, “They are spies.”

Mehmud ur-Rehman, who owns Peer Book Centre in Aabpara, a bustling market, said that American aid was not reaching many Pakistani people. “Had it been so, people would not be fighting for sugar and flour in long queues across the country,” Mr. Rehman, 49, said. He is currently on bail, having spent a few weeks in prison on charges of selling Islamic books that had been banned by the former government.

Mr. Rehman said the economic crisis had hit him hard. “I have been selling books for 30 years,” he said. “But now the earnings have dropped by half. I don’t have money to timely pay the wholesale trader from whom I get stationery.”


Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Mehmud ur-Rehman, who owns the Peer Book Centre, also views U.S. aid with suspicion.
He said a friend of his, Abid Rehman, died in the terrorist attack on World Food Program office in Islamabad. But he refused to accept that Taliban militants were behind the attack. It was a conspiracy, he said. Even the public claim of responsibility by a Taliban spokesman did not convince him.

Like most Pakistanis, he also voiced suspicion over the United States’ interests in Pakistan, saying that America wanted to denuclearize Pakistan.

During the conversation with Mr. Rehman, an old bearded man, leaning on a walking stick, entered the store. Everyone stood up in deference.

Fazl-e-Haq, 87, dressed in a blue striped shirt and gray trousers, was a former inspector general of the Pakistan Police. Since 1980, he has been writing a column in Jang, the country’s most widely read Urdu daily.

“There will be a revolution in Pakistan by the third quarter 2010,” Mr. Haq said in a somber voice.

“In a country where people are dying of hunger, where women are being kidnapped and raped, where justice or flour is not available to the poor, revolution does not come by knocking at the door first,” he added. “And this will not be a peaceful revolution. It will be a bloody revolution. We have lost our honor. We have sold ourselves.”

Everyone gathered in the store nodded.

And what about America, I asked after having a little dose from this harbinger of doom.

“America is breathing its last,” Mr. Haq replied in a trembling but sure-sounding voice. “Afghanistan will be the graveyard of American imperialism.”

Sudan Fines Woman Who Wore Pants

September 8, 2009
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and WALEED ARAFAT
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/world/africa/08sudan.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

NAIROBI, Kenya — A Sudanese woman who wore pants in public was fined the equivalent of $200 but spared a whipping Monday when a court found her guilty of violating Sudan’s decency laws.

The woman, Lubna Hussein, an outspoken journalist who had recently worked for the United Nations, faced up to 40 lashes in the case, which has generated a swarm of interest both inside and outside Sudan.

Mrs. Hussein vowed to appeal the sentence and even marched into the court in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, wearing the same pair of loose-fitting green slacks that she was arrested in.

Manal Awad Khogali, one of her lawyers, said the judge hearing the case called only police witnesses to testify and refused to allow Mrs. Hussein — who has pledged to use her trial to bring attention to women’s rights in Sudan — to defend herself.

“He didn’t give us a chance,” Mrs. Manal said.

After the trial was over, Mrs. Hussein, a 34-year-old widow, seemed defiant as ever. “I will not pay a penny,” she told The Associated Press.

The judge had threatened to jail her for one month if she did not pay the fine. But according to The A.P., Mrs. Hussein flatly said: “I would spend a month in jail. It is a chance to explore the conditions in jail.”

On Monday night, after refusing her lawyers’ advice to pay up, Mrs. Hussein was whisked off to jail, though her lawyers said that in the coming days a committee formed for her defense may pay the fine and free her.

Sudan is partly governed by Islamic law, which calls for women to dress modestly. But the law is vague. According to Article 152 of Sudan’s penal code, anyone “who commits an indecent act which violates public morality or wears indecent clothing” can be fined and lashed up to 40 times.

It was the potential lashing, customarily carried out with a plastic whip that can leave permanent scars, that seemed to raise so many eyebrows. On Monday, diplomats from the British, French, Canadian, Swedish and Dutch Embassies showed up at the Khartoum courthouse, along with a throng of women protesters, many wearing pants. Witnesses said several bearded counterprotesters in traditional Islamic dress also arrived and yelled out “God is Great.”

Riot police broke up the demonstration and carted away more than 40 women. Sudanese officials said they were released shortly later. Witnesses said the police beat up at least one woman.

Mrs. Hussein is a career journalist who recently worked as a public information assistant for the United Nations in Sudan. She quit, she said, because she did not want to get the United Nations embroiled in her case.

But just as it did with the closely-watched case of a British schoolteacher, who faced whippings and a prison sentence in 2007 for allowing her 7-year-old students to name a class teddy bear Muhammad, the Sudanese government found a compromise.

Sudan’s leaders are eager to normalize relations with the United States and other Western countries and appeared to come up with a solution in which Mrs. Hussein was punished but not so severely as to draw more international ire.

She was arrested in July, along with 12 other women, who were caught at a cafe wearing trousers.

“I am Muslim. I understand Muslim law,” Mrs. Hussein said in an interview on Friday. “But I ask: What passage in the Koran says women can’t wear pants? This is not nice.”

Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, and Waleed Arafat from Khartoum, Sudan.

Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book

August 13, 2009
By PATRICIA COHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/books/13book.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=yale%20university%20press,%20danish%20islam&st=cse

It’s not all that surprising that Yale University Press would be wary of reprinting notoriously controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a forthcoming book. After all, when the 12 caricatures were first published by a Danish newspaper a few years ago and reprinted by other European publications, Muslims all over the world angrily protested, calling the images — which included one in which Muhammad wore a turban in the shape of a bomb — blasphemous. In the Middle East and Africa some rioted, burning and vandalizing embassies; others demanded a boycott of Danish goods; a few nations recalled their ambassadors from Denmark. In the end at least 200 people were killed.

So Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.

The book’s author, Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., reluctantly accepted Yale University Press’s decision not to publish the cartoons. But she was disturbed by the withdrawal of the other representations of Muhammad. All of those images are widely available, Ms. Klausen said by telephone, adding that “Muslim friends, leaders and activists thought that the incident was misunderstood, so the cartoons needed to be reprinted so we could have a discussion about it.” The book is due out in November.

John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said by telephone that the decision was difficult, but the recommendation to withdraw the images, including the historical ones of Muhammad, was “overwhelming and unanimous.” The cartoons are freely available on the Internet and can be accurately described in words, Mr. Donatich said, so reprinting them could be interpreted easily as gratuitous.

He noted that he had been involved in publishing other controversial books — like “The King Never Smiles” by Paul M. Handley, a recent unauthorized biography of Thailand’s current monarch — and “I’ve never blinked.” But, he said, “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”

Reza Aslan, a religion scholar and the author of “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” is a fan of the book but decided to withdraw his supportive blurb that was to appear in the book after Yale University Press dropped the pictures. The book is “a definitive account of the entire controversy,” he said, “but to not include the actual cartoons is to me, frankly, idiotic.”

In Mr. Aslan’s view no danger remains. “The controversy has died out now, anyone who wants to see them can see them,” he said of the cartoons, noting that he has written and lectured extensively about the incident and shown the cartoons without any negative reaction. He added that none of the violence occurred in the United States: “There were people who were annoyed, and what kind of publishing house doesn’t publish something that annoys some people?”

“This is an academic book for an academic audience by an academic press,” he continued. “There is no chance of this book having a global audience, let alone causing a global outcry.” He added, “It’s not just academic cowardice, it is just silly and unnecessary.”

Mr. Donatich said that the images were still provoking unrest as recently as last year when the Danish police arrested three men suspected of trying to kill the artist who drew the cartoon depicting Muhammad’s turban as a bomb. He quoted one of the experts consulted by Yale — Ibrahim Gambari, special adviser to the secretary general of the United Nations and the former foreign minister of Nigeria — as concluding: “You can count on violence if any illustration of the prophet is published. It will cause riots, I predict, from Indonesia to Nigeria.”

Aside from the disagreement about the images, Ms. Klausen said she was also disturbed by Yale’s insistence that she could read a 14-page summary of the consultants’ recommendations only if she signed a confidentiality agreement that forbade her from talking about them. “I perceive it to be a gag order,” she said, after declining to sign. While she could understand why some of the individuals consulted might prefer to remain unidentified, she said, she did not see why she should be precluded from talking about their conclusions.

Linda Koch Lorimer, vice president and secretary of Yale University, who had discussed the summary with Ms. Klausen, said on Wednesday that she was merely following the original wishes of the consultants, some of whom subsequently agreed to be identified.

Ms. Klausen, who is also the author of “The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe,” argued that the cartoon protests were not spontaneous but rather orchestrated demonstrations by extremists in Denmark and Egypt who were trying to influence elections there and by others hoping to destabilize governments in Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya and Nigeria. The cartoons, she maintained, were a pretext, a way to mobilize dissent in the Muslim world.

Although many Muslims believe the Koran prohibits images of the prophet, Muhammad has been depicted through the centuries in both Islamic and Western art without inciting disturbances.

Rather than sign a joint editor’s note for the book and the removal of the images, Ms. Klausen has requested instead that a statement from her be included. “I agreed,” she said, “to the press’s decision to not print the cartoons and other hitherto uncontroversial illustrations featuring images of the Muslim prophet, with sadness. But I also never intended the book to become another demonstration for or against the cartoons, and hope the book can still serve its intended purpose without illustrations.”

Other publishers, including The New York Times, chose not to print the cartoons or images of Muhammad when the controversy erupted worldwide in February 2006.

Ms. Klausen said, “I can understand that a university is risk averse, and they will make that choice” not to publish the cartoons, but Yale University Press, she added, went too far in taking out the other images of Muhammad.

“The book’s message,” Ms. Klausen said, “is that we need to calm down and look at this carefully.”


August 13, 2009, 1:06 pm
Discussion: The Yale Press Decision Not to Publish Controversial Cartoons
By Patricia Cohen
Yale University Press decided to pull 12 controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad from a forthcoming book after a number of experts on Islam and counterterrorism warned that reprinting them could cause violence. When the cartoons were published in 2005 and 2006, riots erupted around the world and more than 200 people were killed. The press withdrew the drawings as well all other images of the prophet from the book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” which details the entire controversy. Some argue that Yale University Press’s decision is a defeat for free expression and a victory for extremists. Others maintain the removal of the images is prudent given the risk of violence.

August 13, 2009
3:45 pm


The university should be apologizing to the author for not only removing the so-called “offensive” cartoons, but also removing other noted illustrative examples of Muhammed.

Central to the point, Muslim extremists are using their clout to forcefully bend the laws of the land to cater their specific needs, just witness Europe, Middle East, Asia. They should learn to assimilate and become part of the new country they selectively chose for themselves, and learn to live in harmony with their neighbors.

Censorship reflects society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. ~Potter Stewart

— FireInsideTheMan

4. August 13, 2009
5:11 pm


Apparently the post-modern university requires an outside panel to tell them what’s right. I would too if I didn’t have any convictions of my own.

— Stewart Trickett

5. August 13, 2009
5:28 pm


This strange and sad decision by Yale raises questions not only of academic freedom, but also of the role of universities and university presses in our culture. University presses provide a vehicle for disseminating scholarly research that is important to human knowledge and understanding, but not always commercially viable. As universities such as Yale grow into mega-corporations preoccupied with brand management, the university presses within them are squeezed by these pressures and their very integrity and reason for being are inherently subject to compromise. This could have happened at Harvard, Princeton, or Oxford University Press instead. It may well be for this reason that the author decided not to pull the book entirely, wishing to see her life’s work published in imperfect form rather than not published at all. The author has my sympathies, but my deepest concern is for all of us and for what other realms of knowledge and understanding will remain unpublished or even unexplored if this troubling trend continues.

— Ilsa Frank

6. August 13, 2009
6:02 pm


“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance”

Too bad the cowards at Yale are so afraid of being politically incorrect so they exercise self censorship

Milton had a few things to say on the subject as well.

Yale betrays the whole ethos of Western liberalism to the cause of convenience.

I’m with Ilsa.

— david wilder

7. August 13, 2009
6:41 pm


brave, brave Yale Press. I’m so proud.

— jeff hamren

8. August 13, 2009
7:33 pm


Probably Yale is partly funded by Saudi donations?

— Gerald Boisen

9. August 13, 2009
10:34 pm


Lux et veritas? Sad and scary tale…

— esthermiriam

10. August 13, 2009
10:36 pm


Brandeis has closed its fine art museum and wants to sell its collection, Yale edits out the visual from a work of scholarship about them — what is going on out there?

— esthermiriam

11. August 13, 2009
11:56 pm


Mr. Donatich justifies the Press’s acquiescence with the panel of authorities by equating publication of the images with having “blood on [his] hands.” But these anonymous advisers have nothing to gain and everything to lose from giving the Press the green light. Was the reverse question asked: who would be helped, and who might be protected, by Ms. Klausen’s contribution to the debate?

— Emily Satterthwaite

12. August 14, 2009
3:33 am


The cowardice and the tortured excuses are breathtaking. There is another point besides the obvious one of academic freedom and bowing to generalized intimidation. The book is an effort to examine these images and put them in a context of other images of Muhammad. By not printing these images, Yale University is effectively disassociating itself from this point of view. The sub-text is that these images are too offensive to even reprint. This undermines the author’s work. I wish some other university press would step forward and offer to publish the book as is. Or even better, a joint publication of a broad range of scholarly publishers.

— Robert Sadin

13. August 14, 2009
8:56 am


Yale’s decision sadly confirms the diminishing role of academia in expanding our understanding of the world around us. This is a complex story worth exploring fully without censorship!

— Sam Cruz

14. August 14, 2009
9:19 am


Not only is this proof of people knuckling under to the undue influence of religions (whatever ones they may be), it also shows how censorship rears its ugly head much too often in today’s world. In addition, can anyone reading this book really take any of it seriously when they do not print the very cartoons that the book is about? Is the Yale University Press going to now start printing art books with hundreds of high-grade blank pages because someone, somewhere, might object to a bit of Renaissance nudity. Titian beware! The invasion of the YUPies is near!

— David

15. August 14, 2009
10:47 am


Why blame Yale only? None of the U.S. newspapers or publication published those articles- but they did widespread reporting on it.

— Karan

16. August 14, 2009
12:28 pm


Well done! The most rational and decent desision made in a long time by those in the world of commications. In a culture bent on ratings and firing people up the simplicity in simply doing the right thing is without a doubt the most powerful. People need to be more reflective about their own behavior and right now I choose to think about the word - respect - and what it means, and then finding the power in this word, and then the act of being respectful, towards all things and all people.
Well done Yale Press, well done.

Ellen

— Ellen Shanley

17. August 14, 2009
3:23 pm


Way to go guys - stand up for academic freedom at all costs and then…..
Oops, my mistake - sorry about that.

— Charles Duwel

18. August 14, 2009
10:32 pm


The current administration at Yale, like an increasing number of their colleagues in the American academy, while continuing to wave their flags of pedagogical excellence fervently in a mild breeze, fold them away when the winds pick up. They believe in very little.

What they do seem to believe in and have done very well is raising money, and previously generous alumni who are upset by this nauseating display of academic cowardice and censorship should take note.

— Ben Ledbetter

19. August 15, 2009
10:10 am


The money trail is pretty clear. Yale is a partner to the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. I am sure they do not want to lose their $50 million gift from the Saudis by offending them with this book.

— Roberta Wagner

20. August 17, 2009
9:36 am


Will the Yale School of Medicine begin to censor their textbooks and language when discussing conditions concerning “private areas”? After all, everyone can see this material on the internet. That would be favorable over offending someone living near, say, the Indonesian embassy.

— Brian

21. August 17, 2009
12:23 pm


Yale is setting a frightening precedent as one of the leading academic presses in the country. In not publishing these images (not only the cartoons, but other widely viewed and available images of Muhammad), Yale Press believes it will protect people from the furor they incite – instead it is allowing such furor to trump reasonable discussion, debate and scholarly investigation, which is exactly what Ms. Klausen is arguing in her book: “The book’s message is that we need to calm down and look at this carefully.”

You can read more about how First Amendment advocates are responding to this at the National Coalition Against Censorship’s blog: http://ncacblog.wordpress.com.

— Claire

22. August 17, 2009
1:12 pm


This is the very definition of Cowardice.

— Christian in NYC

23. August 19, 2009
12:42 pm

To #8….i do believe that ex president whats his name and his father did at least drive by yale, but am uncertain as to what education they may have received there …and yes, as i recall, the ex pres. does have extremely warm relations with saudi arabia.

— FAL

Showcase: Neighborly Hatred

If you have the chance check out the NYTs gallery of photos and video on their website! Plus Justyna's website, which is amazing!!!

September 3, 2009, 12:00 am
By James Estrin
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/showcase-45/?ref=global-home

PERPIGNAN, France — If you want to understand why Justyna Mielnikiewicz has spent eight years photographing border disputes and ethnic conflicts in the South Caucasus, you should know two stories from her childhood.

First: When she was a child in Marklowice, in the Silesian region of Poland, she said her family spoke “proper” Polish at home and the local Silesian dialect outside, to fit in with the locals. Justyna watched her sister switch to dialect the moment she crossed the fence around their yard. But Justyna was a stubborn child and got it in her head to speak only proper Polish everywhere. As a result, she was mercilessly bullied by her schoolmates and nicknamed “the stranger.”

Second: On the way to school every day, she passed a large monument commemorating the Auschwitz prisoners who were marched through her village by the German army as they retreated from the Russians in early 1945. Thousands died along the way.

Now, Ms. Mielnikiewicz, 36, focuses on the crossroads between ethnicity, political borders and history. She sees the Caucasus — where Russia has recognized the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent from Georgia — as a place perfectly suited to explore these themes.

She recalled: “When I started going to Abkhazia, people said: ‘Why are you coming here? Nobody’s interested. I said it’s because it’s my personal journey to learn why people are doing this to each other, why people who live together can suddenly hate each other.”

This eight-year journey has now brought Ms. Mielnikiewicz to the Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival in France, where she is to receive the Canon Female Photojournalist Award on Saturday. It is presented by the French Association of Female Journalists and includes a prize of 8,000 euros ($11,418) that will enable Ms. Mielnikiewicz to finish a project that will be exhibited at next year’s festival in Perpignan.

Ms. Mielnikiewicz photographed the war in South Ossetia for The Times. Her coverage included an audio slide show, “Photographers Journal: Fleeing the Georgian Conflict” and her pictures appeared in “Conflict in South Ossetia.”

Patrick Witty, the international picture editor at The Times, worked closely with Ms. Mielnikiewicz. On the second day of the war, he recalled, she sent him an e-mail message saying she had no ambitions to become a war photographer. “Despite this,” Mr. Witty said, “and despite her lack of a flak jacket, a helmet, or any experience photographing conflict before, she made the most memorable and moving pictures of the war. Her work is breathtaking.”

For the Perpignan competition, however, the photographs she submitted were not about the war but about the context of the war and the forces that create divisions.

While the chaos of war was a jarring experience for Ms. Mielnikiewicz, it was the the empty streets of the the Georgian city of Gori that really bothered her.

“I never realized that silence was the scariest thing, more than the explosions,” she said. “There were no cars, no one walking. It is not normal to hear silence in a big city. During war, reality goes upside down.”

The fighting has ended — at least for now — and Ms. Mielnikiewicz has gone back to documenting the context of the conflict . She is still trying to figure out why people can act so cruelly to their neighbors.

For Longtime Captives, a Complex Road Home

September 1, 2009
By BENEDICT CAREY
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/health/01psych.html?ref=global-home

Jaycee Dugard has suffered sexual abuse, neglect and emotional manipulation to an extent hard to imagine, according to the charges in the case involving her abduction. But therapists say the biggest challenge facing Ms. Dugard, who was found last week after 18 years in captivity, may be switching families.

“Her captor was her primary relationship, and the father of her two children, and at some level separation may be difficult for all of them,” said Douglas F. Goldsmith, executive director of the Children’s Center in Salt Lake City. Dr. Goldsmith added that any therapy “has to be mindful that there are three victims, not one, and that they will be entering a new life together.”

About two-thirds of children who are kidnapped or abused suffer lingering mental problems, most often symptoms of post-traumatic stress and depression.

Recent studies have found that about 80 percent of victims do show significant improvement in mood after three to four months of trauma-focused weekly therapy. Still, given the information available so far, experts say Ms. Dugard and her two children face an unusually complex task.

Her stepfather, Carl Probyn, says she has already told her mother of feeling guilt that she bonded with the man who kidnapped her when she was 11. She and her children will have to learn to connect with and trust her first family, the one from which she was taken in 1991.

“The way I think about this case is that it is an extreme version of a phenomenon that is really not that uncommon: a child engaged in an abusive relationship when young and, not knowing any better, coming to accept it as their life, adapting as best they can,” said Lucy Berliner, director of the trauma program at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. “Certainly every case is different, but we now have some proven interventions we can use.”

Therapists say Ms. Dugard’s transition to a new life is likely to take some time, probably years. Elisabeth Fritzl, the Austrian woman held in a dungeon by her father for 24 years, has reportedly undergone extensive therapy and still struggles mentally, 16 months after she was freed.

And Shawn Hornbeck, abducted in Missouri at age 11 in 2002 and held captive for four years, told reporters nearly two years after being freed that he was still learning to cope with the emotional effects.

By contrast, Elizabeth Smart, the young woman in Utah who was kidnapped at age 14 in 2002 and held for nine months, is now reportedly doing well, a student at Brigham Young University. When she was reunited with her family, she told CNN last week, “we just spent time as a family, which was like — it was the best thing I could have done.”

The main challenge in all such cases, experts say, is breaking the bond with the captor and abuser. David Wolfe, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Toronto, has studied victims and some perpetrators of long-term abusive relationships.

In these cases, as in many kidnappings, perpetrators work hard to win the trust of their victims. “It’s a common element,” Dr. Wolfe said. “The child is frightened, and the perpetrator works to gain or regain the child’s confidence, to come across as a really good person: ‘I’m not going to hurt you, everything’s going to be O.K.’ and so on.

“So the child never knows when to fight or run,” he continued. “Do I wait and it’ll get worse? Or do I believe him and I won’t be hurt?”

Humans are wired to form social bonds, and such scraps of kindness can deepen even a relationship built on manipulation and abuse. Some victims have profoundly ambivalent feelings toward abusive captors, psychologists say, and tend to do better when they acknowledge their mixed feelings. Thinking of the perpetrator as a monster feels unfair; on the other hand, it would be wrong to call him merely misguided.

Once victims have shaken the influence of a perpetrator and re-established trust with loved ones, they can better learn through therapy how to ease the impact of their ordeal, said John A. Fairbank, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at Duke and co-director of the U.C.L.A.-Duke University National Center for Child Traumatic Stress.

The most rigorously tested therapy is called trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy. In weekly sessions over three to four months, people learn how to examine and refute suspect assumptions about their ordeal. One of the most common of these is “I can’t trust anyone anymore.” Another is “It’s my fault I didn’t resist more.”

“Of course it is not their fault, and we communicate that,” said Dr. Berliner, the Seattle therapist. “But at the same time, in many cases they did go along, they did make decisions not to fight or run, and we help people examine why they made those decisions — to understand that judging themselves harshly in retrospect might not be fair to the child they were in that moment.”

Typically, people in trauma-focused therapy also learn methods to regulate the strength of their emotions. These methods include simple breathing and relaxation techniques, as well as mindfulness, an exercise in allowing an emotion to take hold and pass without acting on it.

Finally, victims often work with the therapist to build a narrative, oral or written, of the entire ordeal, then file it as a chapter of their lives rather than the entire story. If appropriate, they may also “relive” the experience multiple times until its emotional power wanes. This approach is not for everyone — it seems to make some people more distraught — but experts say it can be helpful in some patients.

So far, Jaycee Dugard seems to be doing just as her fellow abductee Ms. Smart advised: staying with family, keeping herself and her children away from public scrutiny. Those are good instincts, therapists say.

“It’s not like resilience is out of the question in a case like this,” said Dr. Judith A. Cohen, medical director of the Center for Traumatic Stress in Children and Adolescents at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. “In a lot of kidnapping cases, people do remarkably well, and this woman has already shown amazing survival skills.

“That she managed to survive for so long suggests that she might do well in the years to come.”

Police Find Bone Fragment

SAN FRANCISCO — Law enforcement officials in the Bay Area community of Antioch said Monday that a bone fragment had been found in the search of a house neighboring the property of Phillip Garrido, the man charged with abducting Ms. Dugard. But a spokesman for the county sheriff said it was not clear if the fragment was human.

Searchers have been looking for evidence not only in the Dugard case but also in a string of murders in the area. The authorities suspect that Mr. Garrido had access to the neighbor’s property, and may have lived there, in 2006.

2 HBO Filmmakers Blocked From Chinese Festival

September 2, 2009
By EDWARD WONG
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/02/world/asia/02quake.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

BEIJING — When the American filmmakers Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill traveled around Sichuan Province last year to document the anger of parents whose children had died in school collapses during the earthquake in May, they ran into a chilly reception from officials.

Police officers harassed the two men and their co-workers, detained them and interrogated them for eight hours, they said.

Now, the Chinese government has denied both of them visas, blocking them from presenting their documentary, “China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province,” at the Beijing Independent Film Festival this week. The two men, who made the film for HBO with co-producer Peter Kwong, said their visa applications were rejected late last week. No explanation was given by the Chinese Consulate in New York, where the application was filed, they said.

“We are extremely disappointed that the Chinese government denied our request for visas and that we will not be permitted to discuss this film with a Chinese audience in Beijing,” Mr. Alpert and Mr. O’Neill said in a joint e-mail message. “The denial of our visas fits in with a pattern of what seems to be a complete commitment on the part of this Chinese government to crush any inquiry into the possibility of wrongful deaths during the earthquake in Sichuan.”

Chen Cong, a vice consul in the press office of the Chinese Consulate in New York, declined to explain the rejection, saying that diplomatic organizations had “the right not to give a reason for why the visa was denied.”

Mr. Alpert and Mr. O’Neill have both won Emmy Awards and have worked together on highly praised documentaries, including “Baghdad ER.” The Sichuan documentary was shown on HBO in May, one year after the earthquake, and got positive reviews. The official Web site of the film is blocked in China.

The Chinese government has gone to great lengths to silence any mention of the collapsed schools and, according to an official count, the 5,335 children who died or remain missing. In the weeks after the earthquake, which left nearly 87,000 people dead or missing, parents took to the streets to demand official investigations into why so many school buildings had collapsed even though other buildings around them remained standing. The parents said shoddy construction and corruption were the obvious causes.

Local officials ordered security forces to detain the parents or tried to buy the silence of the parents with compensation money. Meanwhile, journalists who tried approaching the schools were stopped, and two rights advocates who pressed for official inquiries were detained. The two advocates, Huang Qi and Tan Zuoren, were put on trial last month.

Artists trying to raise the consciousness over the collapsed schools have been similarly harassed. The Chinese filmmaker, Pan Jianlin, was tracked by security officials after his documentary on the deaths, “Who Killed Our Children?” was shown last year at the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea. Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist who often criticizes the Communist Party, had his Web site blocked after he tried to compile online a comprehensive tally of dead schoolchildren. He was temporarily detained in Sichuan last month when he tried to attend the trial of Mr. Tan.

A person helping to organize the film festival in Beijing said the HBO documentary would be shown on Thursday even though the filmmakers will not be able to attend. The festival is showcasing more than 80 films, and each one is generally shown once.

Mr. Alpert and Mr. O’Neill said there might be a possibility of talking to the audience by phone.

“We knew there was the possibility of rejection,” they said, “but we were hopeful that the Chinese government would allow us to discuss our work openly and in a spirit of constructive dialogue.”

Women at Arms

This is a really interesting article on women in the US Military Forces. If you enjoy the article, check out the link, and visit the multimedia the NYT offers on the subject.

August 16, 2009
G.I. Jane Breaks the Combat Barrier as War Evolves
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/us/16women.html?_r=1&hp
As the convoy rumbled up the road in Iraq, Specialist Veronica Alfaro was struck by the beauty of fireflies dancing in the night. Then she heard the unmistakable pinging of tracer rounds and, in a Baghdad moment, realized the insects were illuminated bullets.

She jumped from behind the wheel of her gun truck, grabbed her medical bag and sprinted 50 yards to a stalled civilian truck. On the way, bullets kicked up dust near her feet. She pulled the badly wounded driver to the ground and got to work.

Despite her best efforts, the driver died, but her heroism that January night last year earned Specialist Alfaro a Bronze Star for valor. She had already received a combat action badge for fending off insurgents as a machine gunner.

“I did everything there,” Ms. Alfaro, 25, said of her time in Iraq. “I gunned. I drove. I ran as a truck commander. And underneath it all, I was a medic.”

Before 2001, America’s military women had rarely seen ground combat. Their jobs kept them mostly away from enemy lines, as military policy dictates.

But the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, often fought in marketplaces and alleyways, have changed that. In both countries, women have repeatedly proved their mettle in combat. The number of high-ranking women and women who command all-male units has climbed considerably along with their status in the military.

“Iraq has advanced the cause of full integration for women in the Army by leaps and bounds,” said Peter R. Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who served as executive officer to Gen. David H. Petraeus while he was the top American commander in Iraq. “They have earned the confidence and respect of male colleagues.”

Their success, widely known in the military, remains largely hidden from public view. In part, this is because their most challenging work is often the result of a quiet circumvention of military policy.

Women are barred from joining combat branches like the infantry, armor, Special Forces and most field artillery units and from doing support jobs while living with those smaller units. Women can lead some male troops into combat as officers, but they cannot serve with them in battle.

Yet, over and over, in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army commanders have resorted to bureaucratic trickery when they needed more soldiers for crucial jobs, like bomb disposal and intelligence. On paper, for instance, women have been “attached” to a combat unit rather than “assigned.”

This quiet change has not come seamlessly — and it has altered military culture on the battlefield in ways large and small. Women need separate bunks and bathrooms. They face sexual discrimination and rape, and counselors and rape kits are now common in war zones. Commanders also confront a new reality: that soldiers have sex, and some will be evacuated because they are pregnant.

Nonetheless, as soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, women have done nearly as much in battle as their male counterparts: patrolled streets with machine guns, served as gunners on vehicles, disposed of explosives, and driven trucks down bomb-ridden roads. They have proved indispensable in their ability to interact with and search Iraqi and Afghan women for weapons, a job men cannot do for cultural reasons. The Marine Corps has created revolving units — “lionesses” — dedicated to just this task.

A small number of women have even conducted raids, engaging the enemy directly in total disregard of existing policies.

Many experts, including David W. Barno, a retired lieutenant general who commanded forces in Afghanistan; Dr. Mansoor, who now teaches military history at Ohio State University; and John A. Nagl, a retired lieutenant colonel who helped write the Army’s new counterinsurgency field manual, say it is only a matter of time before regulations that have restricted women’s participation in war will be adjusted to meet the reality forged over the last eight years.

The Marine Corps, which is overwhelmingly male and designed for combat, recently opened two more categories of intelligence jobs to women, recognizing the value of their work in Iraq and Afghanistan. In gradually admitting women to combat, the United States will be catching up to the rest of the world. More than a dozen countries allow women in some or all ground combat occupations. Among those pushing boundaries most aggressively is Canada, which has recruited women for the infantry and sent them to Afghanistan.

But the United States military may well be steps ahead of Congress, where opening ground combat jobs to women has met deep resistance in the past.

Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a group that opposes fully integrating women into the Army, said women were doing these jobs with no debate and no Congressional approval.

“I fault the Pentagon for not being straight with uniformed women,” said Ms. Donnelly, who supported unsuccessful efforts by some in Congress in 2005 to restrict women’s roles in these wars. “It’s an ‘anything goes’ situation.”

Poll numbers, however, show that a majority of the public supports allowing women to do more on the battlefield. Fifty-three percent of the respondents in a New York Times/CBS News poll in July, said they would favor permitting women to “join combat units, where they would be directly involved in the ground fighting.” The successful experiences of military women in Iraq and Afghanistan are being used to bolster the efforts of groups who favor letting gay soldiers serve openly. Those opposed to such change say that permitting service members to state their sexual orientation would disrupt the tight cohesion of a unit and lead to harassment and sexual liaisons — arguments also used against allowing women to serve alongside men. But women in Iraq and Afghanistan have debunked many of those fears.

“They made it work with women, which is more complicated in some ways, with sex-segregated facilities and new physical training standards,” said David Stacy, a lobbyist with the Human Rights Campaign, which works for gay equality. “If the military could make that work with good discipline and order, certainly integrating open service of gay and lesbians is within their capability. ”

From Necessity, Opportunity

No one envisioned that Afghanistan and Iraq would elevate the status of women in the armed forces.

But the Iraq insurgency obliterated conventional battle lines. The fight was on every base and street corner, and as the conflict grew longer and more complicated, the all-volunteer military required more soldiers and a different approach to fighting. Commanders were forced to stretch gender boundaries, or in a few cases, erase them altogether.

“We literally could not have fought this war without women,” said Dr. Nagl, who is now president of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington.

Of the two million Americans who have fought in these wars since 2001, more than 220,000 of them, or 11 percent, have been women.

Like men, some women have come home bearing the mental and physical scars of bombs and bullets, loss and killing. Women who are veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars appear to suffer rates of post-traumatic stress disorder comparable to those of men, a recent study showed.

Men still make up the vast majority of the 5,000 war deaths since 2001; nearly 4,000 have been killed by enemy action But 121 women have also died, 66 killed in combat. The rest died in nonhostile action, which includes accidents, illness, suicide and friendly fire. And 620 women have been wounded.

Despite longstanding fears about how the public would react to women coming home in coffins, Americans have responded to their deaths and injuries no differently than to those of male casualties, analysts say. That is a reflection of changing social mores but also a result of the growing number of women — more than 356,000 today — who serve in the armed forces, including the Reserves and the National Guard, 16 percent of the total.

Over all, women say the gains they made in Iraq and Afghanistan have overshadowed the challenges they faced in a combat zone.

“As horrible as this war has been, I fully believe it has given women so many opportunities in the military,” said Linsay Rousseau Burnett, who was one of the first women to serve as a communication specialist with a brigade combat team in Iraq. “Before, they didn’t have the option.”

Although women make up only 6 percent of the top military ranks, these war years have ushered in a series of notable promotions. In 2008, 57 women were serving as generals and admirals in the active-duty military, more than double the number a decade earlier. Last year, Ann E. Dunwoody was the first woman to become a four-star Army general, the highest rank in today’s military and a significant milestone for women. And many more women now lead all-male combat troops into battle.

The Army does not keep complete statistics on the sex of soldiers who receive medals and tracks only active-duty soldiers. But two women have been awarded Silver Stars, one of the military’s highest honors. Many more women have been awarded medals for valor, the statistics show.

To be sure, not all women in the military embrace the idea of going into combat. Like men, a few do what they can to try to get out of deployments. Military women and commanders say some women have timed their pregnancies to avoid deploying or have gotten pregnant in Iraq so they would be sent home. The Army declined to release numbers on how many women have been evacuated from a war zone for pregnancy.

In addition to the dangers, military life is grueling in other ways, especially for mothers juggling parenting and the demands of the military, which require long absences from home. And while the military is doing more to address the threat of sexual harassment and rape, it remains a persistent problem.

Bending Rules, Shifting Views

The rules governing what jobs military women can hold often seem contradictory or muddled. Women, for instance, can serve as machine gunners on Humvees but cannot operate Bradleys, the Army’s armored fighting vehicle. They can work with some long-range artillery but not short-range ones. Women can walk Iraq’s dangerous streets as members of the military police but not as members of the infantry.

And, they can lead combat engineers in war zones as officers, but cannot serve among them. This was the case for Maj. Kellie McCoy, 34, a wisp of an officer who is just over five feet tall. As a captain in 2003 and 2004, she served as the first female engineer company commander in the 82nd Airborne Division and led a platoon of combat engineers in Iraq.

On Sept. 14, 2003, her four-vehicle convoy drove into an ambush. It was attacked by multiple roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. Three soldiers were wounded in the ambush. As one of the wounded stood in the middle of the road, bloody and in shock, Major McCoy ran through enemy fire to get him, discharging her M4 as she led him back to her vehicle. Then, she and the others returned to the “kill zone” to rescue the remaining soldiers. Insurgents shot at them from 15 feet away. But eventually, all 12 soldiers piled into one four-seat Humvee and sped away.

Major McCoy received a Bronze Star for valor and, most important for her, the admiration of her troops. “I think my actions cemented their respect for me,” she wrote in an e-mail message from Iraq. “I worked hard to earn their respect.”

As an officer, Major McCoy’s assignment followed both the letter and the spirit of the regulations.

But in other cases, the rules were bent to get women into combat positions.

In 2004 and 2005, Michael A. Baumann, now a retired lieutenant colonel, commanded 30 enlisted women and 6 female officers as part of a unit patrolling in the Rashid district of Baghdad, an extremely dangerous area at the time.

On paper, he followed military policy. The women were technically assigned to a separate chemical company of the division. In reality, they were core members of his field artillery battalion. Mr. Baumann said the women trained and fought alongside his male soldiers. Everyone from Mr. Baumann’s commanders to the commanding general knew their true function, he said.

“We had to take everybody,” said Mr. Baumann, 46, who wrote a book about his time in Iraq called “Adjust Fire: Transforming to Win in Iraq.” “Nobody could be spared to do something like support.”

Brought up as an old-school Army warrior, Mr. Baumann said he had seriously doubted that women could physically handle infantry duties, citing the weight of the armor and the gear, the heat of Baghdad and the harshness of combat.

“I found out differently,” said Mr. Baumann, now chief financial officer for St. Paul Public Schools in Minnesota. “Not only could they handle it, but in the same way as males. I would go out on patrols every single day with my battalion. I was with them. I was next to them. I saw with my own eyes. I had full trust and confidence in their abilities.”

Mr. Baumann’s experience rings true to many men who have commanded women in Iraq. More than anything, it is seeing women perform under fire that has changed attitudes. But some experts say the hostility toward women in the military was fading on its own. Many young men today have grown up around female athletes, tough sisters and successful women.

As the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan sinks in, some experts and military officers believe that women should be allowed to join all-male combat units in phases (so long as job-specific physical exams are created to test the abilities of men and women).

For New Warfare, New Roles

War is different today, they say. Technology has changed the way some of these jobs are done, making them more mechanized and less strength-dependent. Warfare in Iraq involves a lot more driving than walking.

What is more, not all combat jobs are the same. Handling field artillery or working in Bradleys, for example, are jobs more suited to some women than light infantry duties, which can require carrying heavy packs for miles.

Still, most women in the military express little, if any, desire to join the grueling, testosterone-laden light infantry. But some say they are interested in artillery and armor.

Any change to the policy would require Congressional approval, which lawmakers say is unlikely in the middle of two wars. But women in the military and their allies want their performance in combat to count for something.

“We have to acknowledge it because the military is like any other corporation,” said Representative Loretta Sanchez, Democrat of California and the senior woman on the House Armed Services Committee. “If you are not on the front lines doing what is the main purpose of your existence, then you won’t be viewed as someone who can command.”

Military women said they were encouraged by the words of Representative John M. McHugh, the nominee for Army secretary, who just four years ago supported a failed push in Congress to restrict the role of women in combat zones.

At his Senate hearing in July, Mr. McHugh, Republican of New York, sought to allay concern. “Women in uniform today are not just invaluable,” he said, “they’re irreplaceable.” He added that he would look to expand the number of jobs available to them.

In Mr. Baumann’s view, the reality on the ground long ago outpaced the debate.

“We have crossed that line in Iraq,” he said. “Debate it all you want folks, but the military is going to do what the military needs to do. And they are needing to put women in combat.”

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Baghdad.

Ten Letters

Every day, President Obama reads ten hand-picked letters chosen because they can offer him a glimpse of what's on people's minds and in their hearts.

With that in mind, Amnesty International has compiled powerful letters written by 10 influential thinkers – from an exiled poet to a former military interrogator to an esteemed actor and activist – that boldly make the case against torture.

These letters could not come at a more critical time. News reports last weekend stated that Attorney General Eric Holder is considering naming a special prosecutor to look into Bush-era torture. Ever since Obama's first days in office, Amnesty activists and their allies have called on the administration to investigate abuses committed during Bush's tenure and prosecute former officials where warranted.

While we're still obtaining details on the shape of the investigation, it's clear that we're making headway in our fight for accountability.

These ten letters describe what torture does to its victims, how it undermines our spirit, and what it does to a country that lets those who authorized it go unpunished. With your help, we want to make sure that these letters make their way directly to President Obama's desk.

Through Amnesty's Ten Against Torture effort, you can help draw dramatic, high-profile attention to these letters as they reach the White House and help support our call for accountability.

Read the Ten Against Torture letters and send the one you find most moving to President Obama.

Each letter is a passionate plea to President Obama to restore the United States' reputation, respect the rule of law, and act on values and ideals fundamental to the America we believe in.

Please take a moment to read the powerful words of Sister Dianna Ortiz, who has personally suffered the unimaginable pain of torture:


Mr. President, from anonymous graves, voices still cry out. From clandestine prisons, in the midst of indescribable pain, we, my sisters and brothers, beg you to hear. Will you listen to what we alone know of this crime against humanity —what we know from the inside out? Please hear us! Torture does not end with the release from some clandestine prison. It is not something we 'get over.' Simply, "looking forward" is not an option for us.

Read the rest of Sister Ortiz's letter here and send it to President Obama today.

No organization understands better than Amnesty International the power of writing a simple, honest letter.

For nearly 50 years, Amnesty supporters have signed letters to help free political prisoners from jail and bring brutal human rights abuses to an end. Now, by joining in our Ten Against Torture campaign, you can make sure those responsible for the illegal U.S. torture program are brought to justice.

Make sure that President Obama knows that torture has no place in the America we believe in.

Will What We Don't Know (or Care to Know) Hurt Us?

Note for Readers: This article comes from TomDispatch. It is available on-line at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175092/are_afghan_lives_worth_anything_
Mourning Michael Jackson, Ignoring the Afghan Dead
By Tom Engelhardt

It was a blast. I'm talking about my daughter's wedding. You don't often see a child of yours quite that happy. I'm no party animal, but I danced my 64-year-old legs off. And I can't claim that, as I walked my daughter to the ceremony, or ate, or talked with friends, or simply sat back and watched the young and energetic enjoy themselves, I thought about those Afghan wedding celebrations where the "blast" isn't metaphorical, where the bride, the groom, the partygoers in the midst of revelry die.

In the two weeks since, however, that's been on my mind -- or rather the lack of interest our world shows in dead civilians from a distant imperial war -- and all because of a passage I stumbled upon in a striking article by journalist Anand Gopal. In "Uprooting an Afghan Village" in the June issue of the Progressive magazine, he writes about Garloch, an Afghan village he visited in the eastern province of Laghman. After destructive American raids, Gopal tells us, many of its desperate inhabitants simply packed up and left for exile in Afghan or Pakistani refugee camps.

One early dawn in August 2008, writes Gopal, American helicopters first descended on Garloch for a six-hour raid:

"The Americans claim there were gunshots as they left. The villagers deny it. Regardless, American bombers swooped by the village just after the soldiers left and dropped a payload on one house. It belonged to Haiji Qadir, a pole-thin, wizened old man who was hosting more than forty relatives for a wedding party. The bomb split the house in two, killing sixteen, including twelve from Qadir's family, and wounding scores more... The malek [chief] went to the province's governor and delivered a stern warning: protect our villagers or we will turn against the Americans."

That passage caught my eye because, to the best of my knowledge, I'm the only person in the U.S. who has tried to keep track of the wedding parties wiped out, in whole or part, by American military action since the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in November 2001. With Gopal's report from Garloch, that number, by my count, has reached five (only three of which are well documented in print).

The first occurred in December of that invasion year when a B-52 and two B-1B bombers, wielding precision-guided weapons, managed, according to reports, to wipe out 110 out of 112 revelers in another small Afghan village. At least one Iraqi wedding party near the Syrian border was also eviscerated -- by U.S. planes back in 2004. Soon after that slaughter, responding to media inquiries, an American general asked: "How many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?" Later, in what passed for an acknowledgment of the incident, another American general said: "Could there have been a celebration of some type going on?... Certainly. Bad guys have celebrations." Case closed.

Perhaps over the course of an almost eight-year war in Afghanistan, the toll in wedding parties may seem modest: not even one a year! But before we settle for that figure, evidently so low it's not worth a headline in this country, let's keep in mind that there's no reason to believe:

* I've seen every article in English that, in passing, happens to mention an Afghan wedding slaughter -- the one Gopal notes, for instance, seems to have gotten no other coverage; or

* that other wedding slaughters haven't been recorded in languages I can't read; or

* that, in the rural Pashtun backlands, some U.S. attacks on wedding celebrants might not have made it into news reports anywhere.

In fact, no one knows how many weddings -- rare celebratory moments in an Afghan world that, for three decades, has had little to celebrate -- have been taken out by U.S. planes or raids, or a combination of the two.

Turning the Page on the Past

After the Obama administration took office and the new president doubled down the American bet on the Afghan War, there was a certain amount of anxious chatter in the punditocracy (and even in the military) about Afghanistan being "the graveyard of empires." Of course, no one in Washington was going to admit that the U.S. is just such an empire, only that we may suffer the fate of empires past.

When it comes to wedding parties, though, there turn out to be some similarities to the empire under the last Afghan gravestone. The Soviet Union was, of course, defeated in Afghanistan by some of the very jihadists the U.S. is now fighting, thanks to generous support from the CIA, the Saudis, and Pakistan's intelligence services. It withdrew from that country in defeat in 1989, and went over its own cliff in 1991. As it happens, the Russians, too, evidently made it a habit to knock off Afghan wedding parties, though we have no tally of how many or how regularly.

Reviewing a book on the Soviet-Afghan War for the Washington Monthly, Christian Caryl wrote recently:

"One Soviet soldier recalls an instance in 1987 when his unit opened fire on what they took to be a 'mujaheddin caravan.' The Russians soon discovered that they had slaughtered a roving wedding party on its way from one village to another -- a blunder that soon, all too predictably, inspired a series of revenge attacks on the Red Army troops in the area. This undoubtedly sounds wearily familiar to U.S. and NATO planners (and Afghan government officials) struggling to contain the effects from the 'collateral damage' that is often cited today as one of the major sources of the West's political problems in the country."

And, by the way, don't get me started on that gloomy companion rite to the wedding celebration: the funeral. Even I haven't been counting those, but that doesn't mean the U.S. and its allies haven't been knocking off funeral parties in Afghanistan (and recently, via a CIA drone aircraft, in Pakistan as well).

Following almost two weeks in which the U.S. (and global) media went berserk over the death of one man, in which NBC, for instance, devoted all but about five minutes of one of its prime-time half-hour news broadcasts to nothing -- and I mean nothing -- but the death of Michael Jackson, in which the President of the United States sent a condolence letter to the Jackson family (and was faulted for not having moved more quickly), in which 1.6 million people registered for a chance to get one of 17,500 free tickets to his memorial service... well, why go on? Unless you've been competing in isolation in the next round of Survivor, or are somehow without a TV, or possibly any modern means of communication, you simply can't avoid knowing the rest.

You'd have to make a desperate effort not to know that Michael Jackson (until recently excoriated by the media) had died, and you'd have to make a similarly desperate effort to know that we've knocked off one wedding party after another these last years in Afghanistan. One of these deaths -- Jackson's -- really has little to do with us; the others are, or should be, our responsibility, part of an endless war the American people have either supported or not stopped from continuing. And yet one is a screaming global headline; the others go unnoticed.

You'd think there might, in fact, be room for a small headline somewhere. Didn't those brides, grooms, relatives, and revelers deserve at least one modest, collective corner of some front-page or a story on some prime-time news show in return for their needless suffering? You'd think that some president or high official in Washington might have sent a note of condolence to someone, that there might have been a rising tide of criticism about the slow response here in expressing regrets to the families of Afghans who died under our bombs and missiles.

Here's the truth of it, though: When it comes to Afghan lives -- especially if we think, correctly or not, that our safety is involved -- it doesn't matter whether five wedding parties or 50 go down, two funerals or 25. Our media isn't about to focus real attention on the particular form of barbarity involved -- the American air war over Afghanistan which has been a war of and for, not on, terror.

Now, we're embarked on a new moment -- the Obama moment -- in Afghanistan. More than seven-and-a-half years into the war, in a truly American fashion, we're ready to turn the page on the past, to pretend that none of it really happened, to do it "right" this time around. We're finally going to bring the Afghans over to our side.

We're ready to light out for the territories and start all over again. American troops are now moving south in force, deep into the Pashtun (and Taliban) areas of Afghanistan, and their commanders -- a passel of new generals -- are speaking as one from a new script. It's all about conducting a "holistic counterinsurgency campaign," as new Afghan commander General Stanley A. McChrystal put it in Congressional testimony recently. It's all about "hearts and minds"(though that old Vietnam-era phrase has yet to be resuscitated). It's all about, they say, "protecting civilians" rather than killing Taliban guerrillas; it's all about shaping, clearing, holding, building, not just landing, kicking in doors, and taking off again; it's all about new "rules of engagement" in which the air war will be limited, and attacks on the Taliban curbed or called off if it appears that they might endanger civilians (even if that means the guerrillas get away); it's all about reversing the tide of the war so far, about the fact that civilian casualties caused by air attacks and raids have turned large numbers of Afghans against American and NATO troops.

The commander of the Marines just now heading south, Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, typically said this:

"We need to make sure we understand that the reason we're here is not necessarily the enemy. The reason we're here is the people. What won the war in al-Anbar province [Iraq] and what changed the war in al-Anbar was not that the enemy eventually got tired of fighting. It's that the people chose a side, and they chose us... We'll surround that house and we'll wait. And here's the reason: If you drop that house and there's one woman, one child, one family in that house -- you may have killed 20 Taliban, but by killing that woman or that child in that house, you have lost that community. You are dead to them. You are done."

The Value of a Life

As it happens, however, the past matters -- and keep this in mind (it's what the wedding-party-obliteration record tells us): To Americans, an Afghan life isn't worth a red cent, not when the chips are down.

Back in the Vietnam era, General William Westmoreland, interviewed by movie director Peter Davis for his Oscar-winning film Hearts and Minds, famously said: "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."

In those years, there were many in the U.S., including Davis, who insisted very publicly that a Vietnamese life had the same value as an American one. In the years of the Afghan War, Americans -- our media and, by its relative silence, the public as well -- turned Westmoreland's statement into a way of life as well as a way of war. As one perk of that way of life, most Americans have been able to pretend that our war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with us -- and Michael Jackson's death, everything.

So he dies and our world goes mad. An Afghan wedding party, or five of them, are wiped off the face of the Earth and even a shrug is too much effort.

Here's a question then: Will what we don't know (or don't care to know) hurt us? I'm unsure whether the more depressing answer is yes or no. As it happens, I have no answer to that question anyway, only a bit of advice -- not for us, but for Afghans: If, as General McChrystal and other top military figures expect, the Afghan War and its cross-border sibling in Pakistan go on for another three or four or five years or more, no matter what script we're going by, no matter what we say, believe me, we'll call in the planes. So if I were you, I wouldn't celebrate another marriage, not in a group, not in public, and I'd bury my dead very, very privately.

If you gather, after all, we will come.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

[Note: I documented as fully as I could the previous Afghan wedding slaughters in "The Wedding Crashers: A Short Till-Death-Do-Us-Part History of Bush's Wars" (July 2008). And here's a selection of TomDispatch pieces on related subjects, if you're interested in reading more: "Slaughter, Lies, and Video in Afghanistan" (September 2008), "What Price Slaughter?" (May 2007), "The Billion-Dollar Gravestone" (May 2006), "Catch 2,200: 9 Propositions on the U.S. Air War for Terror" (May 2006), and former U.S. diplomat John Brown's "Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet" (January 2006). You might also visit filmmaker Robert Greenwald's website Rethink Afghanistan.] To view these articles check out Tom's website today!

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

Endangered Language Makes a Come Back in Syria

Syrian president Assad has set up an institute to revive interest in the language of Christ
Ian Black in Maaloula, Tuesday 14 April 2009 10.29 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/14/aramaic-revival-syria
Ilyana Barqil wears skinny jeans, boots and a fur-lined jacket, handy for keeping out the cold in the Qalamoun mountains north of Damascus. She likes TV quiz shows and American films and enjoys swimming. But this thoroughly modern Syrian teenager is also learning Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.

Ilyana, 15, is part of an extraordinary effort to preserve and revive the world's oldest living tongue, still close to what it probably sounded like in Galilee, now in Israel, on the brink of the Christian era.

"In Nazareth when Jesus was born they spoke more or less the same language as we do in Maaloula today," said teacher Imad Reihan, one of the pillars of this picturesque village's Aramaic Language Academy, where Barqil is studying.

"Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani" ("My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me") – Christ's lament on the cross – was famously uttered in Aramaic.

Recognised by Unesco as a "definitely endangered" language, Aramaic is spoken by 7,000 people in Maaloula, dominated by Greek Catholics (Melikites) whose churches and rites long pre-date the arrival of Islam and Arabic. Western Neo-Aramaic, to use its proper linguistic title, is spoken by about 8,000 others in two nearby villages, one now wholly Muslim.

Aramaic's long decline accelerated as the area opened up in the 1920s when the French colonial authorities built a road from Damascus to Aleppo. Television and the internet, and youngsters leaving to work, reduced the number of speakers.

Nowadays, many local men are away driving the huge refrigerated trucks that cross the desert to Saudi Arabia. Still, many old traces remain: in nearby Sidnaya, worshippers at the Church of Our Lady speak Arabic with a distinct Aramaic accent.

But things are definitely looking up. "When I was at school over 30 years ago, we were not allowed to speak Aramaic," said Mukhail Bkheil, standing behind the counter in Abu George's souvenir shop in Maaloula's main square, where buses disgorge tourists visiting the beautiful Church of Mar Takla, an early Christian martyr, in a grotto on the steep cliffside. "Now, thanks to President Assad, we even have an institute teaching it."

Bkheil's party piece is reciting the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic. But he chats freely to friends, underlining the fact that the language is alive and well, not just liturgical.

Saada Sarhan, the language academy administrator, learned Aramaic as a child and is teaching her own children, but often feels social pressure to speak Arabic when non-Aramaic speakers are present. "Otherwise it's rude," she says.

Improbably, Aramaic was given a boost by a Hollywood film, Mel Gibson's controversial Passion of the Christ, released in 2004 before the academy was set up.

Founded by the University of Damascus with government help, its modern premises boast a bank of PCs, new textbooks, a teaching staff of six and 85 students at three different levels.

Elias Taja is another of them: this native Aramaic speaker and retired maths teacher wanted to learn how to write the language. "I talk to my wife and daughter Miladi only in Aramaic though my daughter does sometimes reply in Arabic," he explained over cardamom-flavoured coffee and locally grown pears.

Miladi, 25, recently married a man from Sidnaya who does not speak Aramaic. Taja worries she will not manage to pass it on to her children – his grandchildren.

Syria being Syria, there are political sensitivities, not least because "Arabisation" was a key feature of government education policy after the Ba'ath party came to power in the 1960s.

"In Syria there are a lot of minority groups: Circassians, Armenians, Kurds and Assyrians, so it's a big decision to allow the teaching of other languages in government schools," said Reihan. "But the government is interested in promoting the Aramaic language because it goes back so deep into Syria's history."

Observers say the opening of the Aramaic academy showed a more relaxed and confident attitude by the regime. Scholar George Rizkallah dedicated his 2007 Aramaic textbook to the "great leader and patron of the sciences and education Dr Bashar al-Assad". A large portrait of the president hangs in the principal's office, as in all public buildings in Syria.

Considering the bitter enmity between Syria and Israel, which still occupies the Golan Heights, it is striking that Aramaic letters are so similar to the Hebrew used in rabbinic texts; one reason, perhaps, why the only Aramaic sign in Maaloula is on the academy. "Otherwise people might think some buildings were Israeli settlements," joked one visitor from Damascus.

Linguistic experts say that Syria is doing well in fostering this part of its heritage. "Aramaic is actually pretty healthy in Maaloula," said Professor Geoffrey Kahn, who teaches semitic philology at Cambridge University. "It's the eastern Aramaic dialects in Turkey, Iraq and Iran that are really endangered."

Reihan and colleagues were delighted recently when a Unesco team came to visit and hope for funds to allow them to collect vanishing words into proper dictionaries. The teaching, meanwhile, goes on.

Ilyana started classes last November. "My father speaks Aramaic but my mother doesn't as she's from Lebanon," she said. "I speak OK already but I'm going to carry on as I want to become fluent. I don't know too much about the Aramaic language but I do know that it's ancient."

A Flash of Memory

By ISSEY MIYAKE
Published: July 13, 2009
Tokyo
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/opinion/14miyake.html?_r=1

IN April, President Obama pledged to seek peace and security in a world without nuclear weapons. He called for not simply a reduction, but elimination. His words awakened something buried deeply within me, something about which I have until now been reluctant to discuss.

I realized that I have, perhaps now more than ever, a personal and moral responsibility to speak out as one who survived what Mr. Obama called the “flash of light.”

On Aug. 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on my hometown, Hiroshima. I was there, and only 7 years old. When I close my eyes, I still see things no one should ever experience: a bright red light, the black cloud soon after, people running in every direction trying desperately to escape — I remember it all. Within three years, my mother died from radiation exposure.

I have never chosen to share my memories or thoughts of that day. I have tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to put them behind me, preferring to think of things that can be created, not destroyed, and that bring beauty and joy. I gravitated toward the field of clothing design, partly because it is a creative format that is modern and optimistic.

I tried never to be defined by my past. I did not want to be labeled “the designer who survived the atomic bomb,” and therefore I have always avoided questions about Hiroshima. They made me uncomfortable.

But now I realize it is a subject that must be discussed if we are ever to rid the world of nuclear weapons. There is a movement in Hiroshima to invite Mr. Obama to Universal Peace Day on Aug. 6 — the annual commemoration of that fateful day. I hope he will accept. My wish is motivated by a desire not to dwell on the past, but rather to give a sign to the world that the American president’s goal is to work to eliminate nuclear wars in the future.

Last week, Russia and the United States signed an agreement to reduce nuclear arms. This was an important event. However, we are not naïve: no one person or country can stop nuclear warfare. In Japan, we live with the constant threat from our nuclear-armed neighbor North Korea. There are reports of other countries acquiring nuclear technology, too. For there to be any hope of peace, people around the world must add their voices to President Obama’s.

If Mr. Obama could walk across the Peace Bridge in Hiroshima — whose balustrades were designed by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi as a reminder both of his ties to East and West and of what humans do to one another out of hatred — it would be both a real and a symbolic step toward creating a world that knows no fear of nuclear threat. Every step taken is another step closer to world peace.

Issey Miyake is a clothing designer. This article was translated by members of his staff from the Japanese.

Iraq Marks Withdrawal of U.S. Troops From Cities

July 1, 2009
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/world/middleeast/01iraq.html?hpw
BAGHDAD — Iraq celebrated the withdrawal of American troops from its cities with parades, fireworks and a national holiday on Tuesday as the prime minister trumpeted the country’s sovereignty from American occupation to a wary public.

Even with a deadly car bombing and other mayhem marring the day — the deadline for the American troop pullback under an agreement that took effect Jan. 1 — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki seized on the occasion to position himself as a proud leader of a country independent at last, looking ahead to the next milestone of parliamentary elections in January.

He made no mention of American troops in a nationally televised speech, even though nearly 130,000 remain in the country; most had already pulled back from Iraq’s cities before Tuesday’s deadline.

The excitement, however, has rung hollow for many Iraqis, who fear that their country’s security forces are not ready to stand alone and who see the government’s claims of independence as overblown.

From Basra in the south to Mosul in the north, Iraqis expressed skepticism about the proclamation of “independence.”

“They will not withdraw to their homes; they will stay here and there so that they can return in emergencies,” said Samir Alwan, 28, the owner of a mini-market in Basra. “So it is not sovereignty, according to my point of view, and I think that the Iraqi Army is only able to secure the south of the country and unable to secure Baghdad and Mosul.”

In a national address, Mr. Maliki focused his praise on Iraqi troops and security forces for their role in fighting the insurgency. “The national united government succeeded in putting down the sectarian war that was threatening the unity and the sovereignty of Iraq,” he said, as if the United States had played no role.

President Obama, who ran for office on a pledge to end the war, marked the occasion with minimal fanfare, declaring it “an important milestone” even as he warned of “difficult days ahead.”

“The Iraqi people are rightly treating this day as cause for celebration,” he said.

The withdrawal did not command its own presidential appearance — Mr. Obama’s brief remarks were delivered at a ceremony honoring entrepreneurs — a contrast with his predecessor, who rarely missed an opportunity to celebrate milestones in Iraq.

Underscoring the insecurity, a suicide bombing in a market in a Kurdish neighborhood of the volatile northern city of Kirkuk killed 33 people, according to the police there. In Baghdad, the American military reported that four United States soldiers were killed in an attack on Monday, evidence of the vulnerability of the troops as they withdraw.

Military experts anticipate more violence in the days ahead.

Mr. Maliki’s effort to capitalize on Iraq’s latent anti-Americanism and to extol the abilities of his troops is a risky strategy. If it turns out that Iraqi troops cannot control the violence, Mr. Maliki will be vulnerable to criticism from rivals — not only if he has to ask the Americans to return but also if he fails to enforce security without them.

Some American commanders have said they were taken aback by Mr. Maliki’s insistence on taking credit for all the security successes in Iraq. However, they also see the importance of having him and Iraqi troops appear strong, especially in the face of insurgent factions intent on destabilizing the government.

Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander of American troops in Iraq, brushed aside the dismissive tone of public remarks by the country’s leaders about the Americans, saying that Mr. Maliki personally thanked him Monday night and again Tuesday for the sacrifices the American troops had made.

“I do not get these negative comments from the political leaders that are in the government,” he said at a news conference at the American military headquarters at Camp Victory. “In my mind, I frankly don’t worry about those comments because I understand that we are working this together.”

He also played down concerns about security in Iraq’s cities after the withdrawal of most American combat forces, noting that nearly 130,000 troops remained in Iraq. He said the American and Iraqi militaries continued to cooperate on security issues inside and outside the cities.

In most places the transition to the Iraqi forces has gone relatively smoothly, but there have been bumps, reminders of the underlying tensions between the two militaries and the resentment that American soldiers feel as the Iraqis appear eager to push them out the door even though they still want them to be on call.

In Diyala Province, where the Americans closed 11 of 18 bases or outposts before Tuesday’s deadline, the transfers did not go entirely smoothly. An official in Mr. Maliki’s office showed up early at a camp near Baquba and complained that the Americans had not left behind generators and air-conditioners for the Iraqis — something the American commander in the region said had never been part of the agreement. The dispute on Sunday delayed the formal transfer.

“You can’t treat your partners that way,” the commander, Col. Burt K. Thompson of the First Stryker Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, said in Baquba.

For Iraqis, claiming sovereignty is something of a national pastime, with various politicians celebrating different markers: 2004, when the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority handed power to the interim Iraqi government; 2006, when Iraq seated its first constitutionally elected Parliament; and Jan. 1, when the security agreement took effect.

Mr. Maliki seems to be making a conscious effort to cement his image as a strong ruler by using many of the same tools of power as the predecessor he hated so much, Saddam Hussein. He has used the state television network and newspaper to spread nationalist messages, and has used parades and festivals to encourage public pride.

Over the past several days the state television network, Al Iraqiya, not only ran a “Countdown to Sovereignty” clock but also broadcast promotional spots glorifying Iraqi history, culture and people. Its images of the marshes of southern Iraq, the markets of Baghdad, men performing traditional dances and children playing in the mountain meadows of Kurdistan — much of it filmed before the 2003 invasion — presented an image of Iraq completely unfamiliar to most Iraqis, who now live in neighborhoods cordoned off by blast walls and are forced to go through multiple checkpoints every day.

“This is all for the media,” said Amina al-Esadi, a female searcher at the compound of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a religious Shiite political party.

“Some people are afraid because the Americans have left. Some think it will be better because then the enemies of the Americans will leave Iraq” and the country will be safer, she said.

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Baghdad, Sheryl Gay Stolberg from Washington, and employees of The New York Times from Basra and Diyala Province.

Europe Weighs Withdrawing Ambassadors From Tehran

July 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/world/middleeast/02iran.html?_r=1&hpBy ALAN COWELL and STEPHEN CASTLE
PARIS — Iran courted new levels of post-election isolation from the European Union on Wednesday as European diplomats pondered whether to withdraw the ambassadors of all 27 members nations in a dispute over the detention of the British Embassy’s local personnel.

European diplomats said that no formal decision to order their envoys home had been taken but that the measure was an option under consideration as the European Union — Iran’s biggest trading partner — tries to work out how to defuse the dispute in a way that would shield other embassies in Tehran from similar action.

Withdrawing all 27 ambassadors would represent a rare and unusually forceful display of European anger at Iran’s behavior, and several diplomats said the European Union would prefer to avoid it. Diplomats in Europe said they could not recall such concerted action by the entire, expanded bloc.

The initial Iranian response seemed characteristically bellicose. A high-ranking military official demanded that the Europeans apologize for interference in Iran’s affairs, which, he said, disqualified European countries from negotiating on the fraught issue of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

In a statement quoted by the semi-official Fars news agency on Wednesday, Iran’s chief of staff, Hassan Firouzabadi, was quoted as saying that because of the European Union’s “interference” in “the post-election riots, they have lost their qualification to hold nuclear talks with Iran.”

“Before apologizing for their huge mistake,” he said, the European countries have “no right to talk about nuclear negotiations,” according to a Fars report quoted by Reuters.

It was the first sign that Iran might use its post-election dispute to cast further doubt over the stalled nuclear negotiations, buying time to continue a nuclear enrichment program which Tehran says is for peaceful, civilian purposes. Many in the west suspect that Iran is seeking the ability to build nuclear weapons.

Moreover, the statement seemed to add one more layer of complexity to Western assessments of how to deal with Iran.

Since the presidential vote on June 12, members of the European Union have taken a lead in condemning a subsequent violent crackdown on dissenters who have accused the government of manipulating the results to keep the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in power.

The Iranian authorities have especially sought to cast Britain as an instigator of the unrest. They arrested nine local employees of the British Embassy in Tehran over the weekend, though five were released by Monday night. The Iranian authorities accused the local employees of fomenting unrest.

Press TV, a television station financed by the Iranian government, announced that three of the employees were released Wednesday, leaving just one still in custody. That employee, Fars news agency said Wednesday, “had a remarkable role during the recent unrest in managing it behind the scenes.”

As the dispute unfolded, the European Union said it would support Britain, but it has been unclear what form that backing would take.

Carl Bildt, the foreign minister of Sweden, told reporters in Stockholm on Wednesday — the day his country took over the rotating presidency of the European Union — that it was in the interests of both the European Union and Iran to retain full diplomatic ties. But he did not specifically exclude the withdrawal of ambassadors, saying that “from the diplomatic perspective, all options are on the table.”

However, he added that the bloc has “an interest in maintaining full diplomatic relations” with Tehran and that he thought “it would be in Iranian interests that we retain diplomatic courtesies in a situation like this.”

“We are in a dialogue with the Iranian authorities to see if we can sort out the issue,” Mr. Bildt said.

The Swedish prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, said that the European Union had to strike a difficult balance in its relationship with both the Iranian authorities and those protesting for democratic rights. The aim was to do so without polarizing the relationship with Iran and thus offering the government there a pretext for repression by blaming foreign intervention.

In a statement on Sunday, European foreign ministers promised a “strong and collective response” to the diplomatic crisis in Tehran. That led to discussions among senior European diplomats in Brussels on Tuesday. Separate talks among European officials are set to take place in Stockholm on Thursday and Brussels on Friday, a European diplomat said.

European countries have not yet agreed on a course of action, with Germany, Iran’s biggest individual trade partner, and Italy taking a cautious position, while Britain pushes for a tougher and more radical response, the diplomat said on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue.

Some Europeans believe the Iranians can be persuaded to avert a confrontation by quickly releasing the remaining British Embassy staff member.

But the Iranian response, invoking the question of nuclear negotiations that has dominated the relationship between Iran and the West, has illuminated broader implications for the Obama administration’s avowed hopes for a new dialogue with Iran.

In April, the administration said that it would start participating regularly with other major powers in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

At the time, the decision seemed to be a further step toward the direct engagement with Iran that President Obama had promised. It followed an invitation to Iran to join in a new round of talks, which would include Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. And it coincided with an unusual expression of conciliation toward the United States by President Ahmadinejad of Iran, who said that his government would welcome talks with the Obama administration, provided that the shift in American policy was “honest.”

In the past, the Bush administration largely shunned the European-led negotiations with Tehran, but, one year ago, it reluctantly sent a senior diplomat to a single round of talks that ended in stalemate.

Later in April, President Ahmadinejad said he was preparing a new proposal to resolve disputes with the West over Iran’s nuclear program, although he did not give details.

But the aftermath of the June 12 presidential election in Iran seems to have reset the clock. President Obama initially sought to refrain from criticism of the Iranian authorities. After he finally expressed outrage at Tehran’s crackdown, Mr. Ahmadinejad demanded an apology and said Mr. Obama was echoing the policies of the Bush administration.

The elections led to weeks of protest that presented the strongest challenge to the authorities in 30 years.

Late Tuesday, an opposition candidate again insisted he would not accept the outcome and challenged the legitimacy of President Ahmadinejad’s re-election. Mehdi Karroubi, a former Parliament speaker who came a distant fourth in the June 12 vote, said on his Web site that he did not recognize the legitimacy of the ballot.

“I will continue my fight using every means and I’m ready to cooperate with pro-reform people and groups,” he said on the site. Mir Hussain Moussavi, the runner-up, on Wednesday also reasserted his claim that the election was illegitimate, Reuters reported. In an apparent sign of the leadership’s edginess after the protests, Mr. Ahmadinejad canceled a planned overseas trip to Libya on Wednesday, news reports said. His government did not explain why.

In another apparent diplomatic upset, the sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Said, was reported on Wednesday to have postponed indefinitely a visit to Tehran which would have been the first since the fall of the Shah in the 1979 revolution.

Alan Cowell reported from Paris and Stephen Castle from Stockholm. Michael Slackman contributed reporting from Cairo.

Iranian Rally Is Dispersed as Voting Errors Are Admitted

There are 2 articles in this post. After the main news article there is an op-ed piece about the future of Iran's society.

June 23, 2009
By NAZILA FATHI and ALAN COWELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/middleeast/23iran.html?_r=1&hp

TEHRAN — Hours after a warning from the powerful Revolutionary Guards not to return to the streets, about a thousand protesters defiantly gathered in central Tehran on Monday and were quickly dispersed in an overwhelming show of force by police who used clubs and tear gas.

The protesters, far fewer than the numbers who had attended mass rallies last week, turned out despite the warning, on the Guards’ Web site, that they would face a “revolutionary confrontation” if they continued to challenge the results of the June 12 election and their country’s supreme leader, who has pronounced the ballot to be fair.

Even so, Iran’s most senior panel of election monitors, in the most sweeping acknowledgment that the election was flawed, said Monday that the number of votes cast in 50 cities exceeded the actual number of voters, according to a state television report.

The discrepancies could affect some three million ballots of what the government says was 40 million cast, giving the official victory to the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The authorities insisted that the discrepancies did not violate Iranian law. The Guardian Council, charged with certifying the election, said it was not clear whether they would decisively change the result, which placed Mir Hussein Moussavi — who contends the election was stolen from him — in a distant second.

He has urged his supporters to continue their defiance, but he could face arrest for doing so.

“Moussavi’s calling for illegal protests and issuing provocative statements have been a source of recent unrests in Iran,” Ali Shahrokhi, head of parliament’s judiciary committee, semi-official Fars news agency reported, according to Reuters. “Such criminal acts should be confronted firmly.”

He added: “The ground is paved to legally chase Moussavi.”

Mr. Moussavi, the more moderate of the candidates, used a posting on his Web site Sunday night to urge his supporters to demonstrate peacefully, despite warnings from Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that no protests of the vote would be allowed.

“Protesting to lies and fraud is your right,” Mr. Moussavi said.

In an apparent response, a Guards statement Monday told protesters to “be prepared for a resolution and revolutionary confrontation with the Guards, Basij and other security forces and disciplinary forces” if they took their protests into a second week, news reports said.

The Basij is a militia accused by the protesters of brutally repressing demonstrations that culminated in a day of bloodshed on Saturday that ended in the deaths of at least 10 protesters, according to the state television.

The Guards told demonstrators Monday to “end the sabotage and rioting activities,” calling their protests a “conspiracy” against Iran. The warning echoed remarks by a Foreign Ministry spokesman who blamed western governments and media for the unrest.

The official result gave Mr. Ahmadinejad 63 percent of the ballots — an 11-million vote advantage — to Mr. Moussavi’s 34 percent. Turnout was put at 85 percent.

At a news conference Monday, Hassan Qashqavi, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, called the turnout a “brilliant gem which is shining on the peak of dignity of the Iranian nation.”

He accused unidentified western powers and news organizations, which are operating under extremely tight official restrictions, of spreading unacceptable “anarchy and vandalism.” But, he said, the outcome of the vote would not be changed. “We will not allow western media to turn this gem into a worthless stone,” he said.

Mr. Qashqavi drew comparisons with American election results.

“No one encouraged the American people to stage a riot” because they disagreed with the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004, he said. Britain’s Foreign Office said Monday that because of the continuing unrest it would evacuate the families of staff members based in Iran. A spokeswoman, who spoke in return for anonymity under civil service rules, said the violence in Tehran “had a significant impact on the families of our staff who have been unable to carry on their lives as normal.”

Quoted earlier by Press TV, Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, the spokesman for the 12-member Guardian Council denied claims by another losing candidate, Mohsen Rezai, that irregularities had occurred in up to 170 voting districts.

“Statistics provided by the candidates, who claim more than 100 percent of those eligible have cast their ballot in 80 to 170 cities are not accurate — the incident has happened in only 50 cities,” Mr. Kadkhodaei said.

But he said that a voter turnout in excess of the registered voting list was a “normal phenomenon” because people could legally vote in areas other than those in which they were registered. Nonetheless, some analysts in Tehran said, the number of people said to be traveling on election day seemed unusually high.

The news emerged on the English-language Press TV Web site late Sunday as a bitter rift among Iran’s ruling clerics deepened. As increasingly violent protests have swirled through Tehran since the elections, Ayatollah Khamenei has ordered the Guardian Council to investigate the opposition’s allegations of electoral fraud. The council itself has offered a random partial recount of 10 percent of the ballot.

Mr. Kadkhodaei said the Guardian Council could recount votes in areas where irregularities were said by the opposition to have occurred. But “it has yet to be determined whether the possible change in the tally is decisive in the election results.”

The opposition has alleged a total of 646 electoral irregularities and is demanding that the vote be annulled. But in a sermon at Friday prayers last week Ayatollah Khamenei mocked the idea that the huge margin attributed to Mr. Ahmadinejad could have been won through fraud.

On Sunday, the police detained five relatives of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who leads two influential councils and openly supported Mr. Moussavi’s election. The relatives, including Mr. Rafsanjani’s daughter, Faezeh Hashemi, were released after several hours.

The developments, coming one day after protests here in the capital and elsewhere were crushed by police officers and militia members using guns, clubs, tear gas and water cannons, suggested that Ayatollah Khamenei was facing entrenched resistance among some members of the elite.

Though rivalries have been part of Iranian politics since the 1979 revolution, analysts said that open factional competition amid a major political crisis could hinder Ayatollah Khamenei’s ability to restore order.

There was no verifiable accounting of the death toll from the bloodshed on Saturday, partly because the government has imposed severe restrictions on news coverage and warned foreign reporters who remained in the country to stay off the streets.

It also ordered the BBC’s longtime correspondent expelled and Newsweek’s correspondent detained.

State television said that 10 people had died in the weekend clashes, while radio reports said 19. The news agency ISNA said 457 people had been arrested.

In the network of Internet postings and Twitter messages that has become the opposition’s major tool for organizing and sharing information, a powerful and vivid new image emerged: a video posted on several Web sites that showed a young woman, called Neda, her face covered in blood. Text posted with the video said she had been shot. It was not possible to verify the authenticity of the video.

The Web site of another reformist candidate, Mehdi Karoubi, referred to her as a martyr who did not “have a weapon in her soft hands or a grenade in her pocket but became a victim by thugs who are supported by a horrifying security apparatus.”

Mr. Moussavi was not seen in public on Sunday but showed no sign of yielding. In his Web posting, he urged followers to “avoid violence in your protest and behave as though you are the parents that have to tolerate your children’s misbehavior at the security forces.”

He also warned the government to “avoid mass arrests, which will only create distance between society and the security forces.”

Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran, and Alan Cowell from London. Michael Slackman contributed reporting from Cairo.

June 23, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Iran’s Children of Tomorrow
By ROGER COHEN

TEHRAN — They are known mockingly as the “Joojeh Basiji” — the “chicken Basiji.” These are the militia scarcely old enough to manage more than a feeble beard. Teenagers, brainwashed from early childhood, they have been ferried into the capital in large numbers, given a club and a shield and a helmet and told to go to work.

I saw them throughout downtown Tehran on Sunday, seated in the back of grey pick-ups. I saw them, sporting sleeveless camouflage vests, in clusters on corners, leaning on trees, even lolling shoeless on the grass in the central island of Revolution Square.

They were far from alone in a city in military lockdown. Elite riot police with thigh-length black leg guards, helmeted Revolutionary Guards in green uniforms and rifle-touting snipers composed a panoply of menace. The message to protesters was clear: Gather at your peril.

That threat had already been rammed home Saturday evening, when a student named Neda Agha Soltan was killed by a single shot. Her last moments were captured on video that has gone global. Martyrdom is a powerful force in the world of Shia Islam. Mourning on the 3rd and 7th and 40th days after a death form a galvanizing cycle.

Neda is already another name for the anger smoldering here, whose expression, in my experience, has been bravest, deepest and most vivid among women. She could become Iran’s Marianne.

Tehran, cradled in its mountainous amphitheater, is holding its breath. Sunday was quiet and Monday dawned quiet but between them the defiant cries of “Death to the dictator” and “Allah-u-Akbar” reverberated between high-rises once again.

In this pregnant lull, I keep hearing three questions: Will Mir Hussein Moussavi lead? How powerful are the internal divisions of the revolutionary establishment? And what is the ultimate goal of the uprising? On the answer to them will hinge the outcome of this latest fervid expression of Iran’s centennial quest for pluralistic freedom.

After the shootings Saturday that took several lives, Moussavi seemed absent. The bespectacled revolutionary leader thrust now into defiance was silent. People risking their lives craved guidance. Disappointed in 1999 and 2003 by the legalistic kowtowing of the reformist former president, Mohammad Khatami, they feared resignation redux.

Then, early Monday, Moussavi spoke. “Protesting to lies and fraud is your right,” he said, referring to the preposterous manipulation of the June 12 election and laying down the gauntlet again to the once sacrosanct pronouncements of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader invested by the Islamic Revolution with an authority close to the Prophet’s. Last Friday, Khamenei said: “I want everyone to end this sort of action.”

Khamenei also said, “Trust in the Islamic Republic became evident in these elections.”

In fact I believe the loss of trust by millions of Iranians who’d been prepared to tolerate a system they disliked, provided they had a small margin of freedom, constitutes the core political earthquake in Iran. Moderates who once worked the angles are now muttering about making Molotov cocktails and screaming their lungs out after dusk.

Moussavi is trying to calm their rage and coax the multiple security forces to his side. Restraint was the core appeal of his Monday statement. He urged his followers to avoid violence and adopt parental forbearance before the “misbehavior” of security forces — an appropriate reference given all the teenage thugs out there.

I think Moussavi is right to avoid extreme positions even as Khamenei has deliberately radicalized the conflict. He’s right because his moderation fans internal divisions that seem rampant. Any counterrevolutionary stance, at least at this point, would have the opposite effect.

Which brings me to the fight within. On Sunday, I saw Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani, the son of the establishment’s embittered éminence grise, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. He told me his father, who despises President Mahmoud Adhmadinejad, is fighting a furious rearguard action to have the election annulled by the Guardian Council, the 12-member oversight body that will pronounce this week on the election’s legality.

The ruling had seemed a formality, given Khamenei’s summary dismissal of a recount and the loyalist composition of the body, but the Council is now talking about irregularities in 50 cities and discrepancies that could affect 3 million votes. Out of a total of 40 million votes, that’s a significant number.

There are rumblings from the influential parliamentary speaker, Ali Larijani, who is close to Khamenei but not Ahmadinejad. With Rafsanjani, Khatami and the defeated conservative former Revolutionary Guard leader, Mohsen Rezai, the dissenting front has breadth. Rezai, who officially won 680,000 votes, says more than 900,000 voters have written to him with their ID numbers saying they cast their ballot for him.

The third question — the strategic goal of the uprising — is increasingly fraught. Khamenei said, “The dispute is not between the revolution and the counterrevolution,” and that all four electoral candidates “belong to the system.” He was right, if his words had been spoken the day after the vote.

Ten days on, however, the brutal use of force and his own polarizing speech have drawn many more Iranians toward an absolutist stance. Having wanted their votes counted, they now want wholesale change. If Moussavi wants to prevail, he must keep his followers tactically focused on securing a new election. That’s essential because it’s the one position the opposition within the clerical establishment will go along with.

Whatever happens now, all is changed utterly in Iran. Opacity, a force of the Islamic Republic, has yielded to a riveting transparency in which one side confronts another. The online youth of Iran will not be reconciled to a regime that touts global “ethics” and “justice” while trampling on them at home.

I received this from an anonymous Iranian student: “I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to be killed. I’m listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow!”

And she concludes: “I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so that they know we were not just emotional under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mogols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow’s children.”

I bow my head to the youth of Iran, the youth that is open-eyed, bold and far stronger and more numerous than the near-beardless vigilantes.

In New York, Number of Killings Rises With Heat

June 19, 2009
By ANDREW W. LEHREN and AL BAKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/nyregion/19murder.html?hp

A young boxer was shot dead outside a Bronx bodega at 3:30 a.m. on a Saturday last August. Weeks later, a 59-year-old woman was beaten to death on a Saturday night on the side of a Queens highway. On the last Sunday in September, violence exploded as five men were killed in a spate of shootings and stabbings between midnight and 6 a.m.

Seven homicides in New York City. None connected in any way but this: They happened during the summer months, when the temperatures rise, people hit the streets, and New York becomes a more lethal place.

There were more homicides in September than in any other month last year: 52. Next highest was August, with 51. Variations, of course, exist. There were 48 homicides last March, for instance.

Still, the prime time for murder is clear: summertime. Indeed, it is close to a constant, one hammered home painfully from June to September across the decades. And the breakdown of deadly brutality can get even more specific. September Saturdays around 10 p.m. were the most likely moments for a murder in the city.

The summer spike in killings is just one of several findings unearthed in an analysis by The New York Times of multiyear homicide trends. The information — detailing homicides during the years 2003 to 2008 — was compiled mainly from open-records requests with the New York Police Department, and a searchable database of details on homicides in the city during those years is available online for readers to explore at nytimes.com/nyregion.

Of course, the dominant and most important trend involving murder in New York has been the enormous decline in killings over the last 15 years, to levels not seen since the early 1960s.

Still, hundreds of people are killed every year in the city, and The Times’s findings provide insights about who is killed in New York, as well as who does the killing, where murders occur and why.

Women, for instance, are less likely to be either victims or killers. Those who were killed — at least 73 women were in 2008 — were almost always murdered by someone they knew — boyfriends, husbands or relatives. From 2003 to 2008, the number of women killed each year by strangers was in the single digits — excluding cases in which the police do not know if the killer knew the victim. Last year, as few as eight women died at the hands of strangers.

Brooklyn — as it has since at least 2003 — led all boroughs in the number of homicides last year, with 213. Last year, the 73rd Precinct, which includes the neighborhoods of Ocean Hill and Brownsville, had the largest death toll, 31. The bloodiest block in Brooklyn was in the 77th Precinct, in Crown Heights, bounded by Schenectady Avenue, Sterling Place, Troy Avenue and St. Johns Place. But the borough with the most homicides per capita was the Bronx.

More often than not, the weapon of choice is a firearm. Each year the percentage of people killed by firearms hovers around 60 percent. Though slightly less than in recent years, at least 56 percent of last year’s homicides were committed with these weapons.

Of all the trends to emerge, the time for killing was among the most enduring.

In New York, the trend goes back well before the years covered in the database — at least as far as 1981, according to an analysis of reports by the city medical examiner’s office done by Steven F. Messner, a criminology professor at the State University of New York at Albany. And he believes it stretches back much further than that.

Nationally, in the early 1980s, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed a decade’s worth of homicide data across the nation, and found that while suicides peak in the spring, homicides swell between July and September.

A prime reason murder peaks during this time has to do with the routines of people’s lives, according to Professor Messner.

“Homicides vary with social acting,” he said. “It evolves from interactions.”

Summer is when people get together. More specifically, casual drinkers and drug users are more likely to go to bars or parties on weekends and evenings, as opposed to a Tuesday morning. These people in the social mix, flooding the city’s streets and neighborhood bars, feed the peak times for murder, experts say.

And the trend occurs in other cities, in places like Chicago, Boston and Newark, according to criminologists.

Some of the same trends are on display around Christmastime and are believed to be behind the slight increases in murder that occur then, criminologists say.

Thomas D. Nerney, who retired in 2002 as a detective in the New York Police Department’s Major Case Squad, said the patterns were well known within the department.

Assigned as a detective in Brooklyn from 1972 to 1986, he said that on a hot summer night or in the holiday season, a similar set of factors seemed to be behind the killings: a chance to socialize and to drink or use drugs.

He recalled the late 1970s and early ’80s in Brooklyn, when the heavier homicide caseloads seemed to come as neighborhoods got hotter.

“We had so many of them,” Mr. Nerney said. “They would be on rooftops. There might be somebody who lured someone somewhere; you would have a sex-related killing or a revenge killing. Rooftops or backyards.”

The Times analysis, when compared with Professor Messner’s findings from 1981, shows that increasingly, more victims were killed between midnight and 8 a.m. in recent years than in the past.

According to the professor’s study of homicides in Manhattan, 29 percent of the 1,826 victims in 1981 were killed between midnight and 8 a.m. More recently, from 2006 through 2008, 39 percent of all homicide victims were killed during those hours, the Times analysis shows.

Also, as the number of homicides has shrunk, the data shows that more are occurring on weekends. From 2003 to 2008, 36 percent of all victims were killed on Saturday or Sunday, the analysis shows.

Failing to understand the basic connection between time of year and homicide rates can lead law enforcement agencies to faulty conclusions about what is happening in the streets — and it can affect their strategies.

In St. Louis, a 1990s-era gun buyback program begun each fall was thought by some to be behind a drop in violence. But as Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, studied the program’s impact, he found that the annual crime reductions were more attributable to the normal seasonal ebbing in homicide and assaults.

In New York, Vincent Henry, a retired police sergeant who now teaches criminology and who has studied the department’s Compstat program, in which computerized data is used for more efficient policing, said that time was one of many factors in making decisions about staffing and when and how to deploy officers.

But that was not always the case.

In the early 1990s, police managers altered the working hours for various groups of detectives, including those tracking narcotics cases and those seeking to arrest criminals wanted on open warrants.

It seemed to the top officials at the time that too many officers were keeping bankers’ hours — ending their shifts at dusk and taking weekends off — and not working closely enough with counterparts.

Jack Maple, a former police deputy commissioner who helped develop Compstat, wrote a book, “The Crime Fighter,” in which he detailed the issues of the day. He described the shortfall this way: “Unfortunately, the bad guys work around the clock.”

And in the summer months, the bad guys tend to be deadliest.

Ruling Cleric Warns Iranian Protesters

Below this article are the first hand accounts from readers of the NYT blog,so keep on scrolling for more info!

June 20, 2009
By NAZILA FATHI and ALAN COWELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/20/world/middleeast/20iran.html?_r=1&hp

TEHRAN — In his first public response to days of mass protests, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sternly warned opposition supporters on Friday to stay off the streets and raised the prospect of violence if the defiant, vast demonstrations continued.

Opposition leaders, he said, will be “responsible for bloodshed and chaos” if they do not stop further rallies.

He said he would never give in to “illegal pressures” and denied their accusations that last week’s presidential election was rigged, praising the officially declared landslide for the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as an “epic moment that became a historic moment.”

He spoke somberly for more than an hour and a half at Friday Prayer to tens of thousands of people at Tehran University, with Mr. Ahmadinejad in attendance. His sermon was broadcast over loudspeakers to throngs in the adjoining streets, and the crowds erupted repeatedly in roars of support. Opposition supporters had spread the word among themselves not to attend.

“Street challenge is not acceptable,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, according to a rendering by the BBC. “This questions the principles of election and democracy.”

There was no immediate response from opposition leaders.

The ominous speech sharply increased the confrontation between Iran’s rulers and supporters of the main opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, who have accused the authorities of rigging the vote and called for or encouraged the huge silent marches in Tehran for the last four days. No rally was planned for Friday, and opposition supporters did not appear to be gathering impromptu.

But on Saturday, a group of reformist clerics loyal to the former President Mohammed Khatami planned to demonstrate against the election results, saying they had been given rare official permission. Some news reports, however, said that the gathering had been banned.

Ayatollah Khamenei instructed dissenters to pursue their complaints about the June 12 ballot through legal channels, insisting that the turnout — officially put at 85 percent — showed it to be a reflection of the national will.

Reiterating his Saturday affirmation of the official election results, he said that the participation, as officially reported, had shown “the hand of the Lord of ages supporting such a great development.”

“This is a sign of God’s mercy for this nation. The fate of the country should be decided in ballot boxes, not on the streets,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, framing his position as a commitment to the law and the orderly functioning of government.

“If we break the law, we will have to do it in every election and no election would be immune,” he said. “This is wrong. This is the beginning of dictatorship.”

He said that the margin of victory — 11 million votes — accorded to Mr. Ahmadinejad in the official tally was so big that it could not have been falsified.

“How can 11 million votes be replaced or changed?” he said. “The Islamic Republic would not cheat and would not betray the vote of the people.”

Some Iranians, who spoke in return for anonymity for fear of official reprisals, said the sermon showed that Iran was in the grips of what one person called “an all-or-nothing showdown” between the authorities and reformists.

Iranians had been looking to the ayatollah’s appearance for clues as to whether the authorities were prepared to bend to opposition demands. But he showed no readiness to countenance their demands that the election be annulled or to veer from the line he has taken since he endorsed the vote almost as soon as the results were made known last Saturday.

Ayatollah Khamenei blamed “media belonging to Zionists, evil media” for seeking to show divisions between those who supported the Iranian state and those who did not, while, in fact, the election had shown Iranians to be united in their commitment to the Islamic revolutionary state.

“There are 40 million votes for the revolution, not just 24 million for the chosen president,” he said, referring to the official count that gave Mr. Ahmadinejad more than 60 percent of the ballot.

He said the election “ was a competition among people who believe in the state.”

He also spoke of the religious roots of “our revolutionary society.”

“Despite all the diversions, our people are faithful,” he said, but urged young Iranians to lead more spiritual lives. “The youth are confused. Being away from spirituality has caused confusion. They don’t know what to do.”

He accused what he called arrogant Western powers, particularly Britain and the United States, of showing their hostility to the Iranian Islamic revolution in remarks casting doubt on the election. And he warned them not meddle in Iran’s affairs, accusing them of failing to understand the nature of Iranian society.

The British government, which the supreme leader singled out as the “most treacherous” of the Western powers, responded swiftly, summoning Iran’s ambassador in London to the Foreign Office to complain. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, cautious until now in its comments on the Iranian election, stepped up his public criticism.

“We are with others, including the whole of the European Union unanimously today, in condemning the use of violence, in condemning media suppression,” he told a news conference after a European Union summit in Brussels.

“It is for Iran now to show the world that the elections have been fair...that the repression and the brutality that we have seen in these last few days is not something that is going to be repeated,” Mr. Brown said, Reuters reported.

Throughout the week of protests, Iran’s leaders have offered conciliation, while simultaneously wielding repression.

On Thursday, for instance, the government offered to talk to the opposition, inviting the three losing presidential candidates to meet with the powerful Guardian Council.

But the government’s offers of modest and reluctant concessions have been accompanied by continued arrests of prominent reformers and efforts to stifle the flow of information by limiting Internet access and pressuring reporters to stay off the streets.

It was not clear whether Iran’s government, made up of fractious power centers, was pursuing a calculated strategy or if the moves reflected internal disagreements, or even an uncertainty not apparent in Ayatollah Khamenei’s address.

“Most analysts believe the outreach is just to kill time and extend this while they search for a solution, although there doesn’t seem to be any,” said a political analyst in Tehran, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “This will only be a postponement of the inevitable, which is indeed a brutal crackdown.”

It was not clear what role was being played by a former Iranian president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who supported Mr. Moussavi and is in a power struggle with Ayatollah Khamenei. There were unconfirmed reports Thursday that two of his children had been banned from leaving the country because of their role in helping the protesters.

Ayatollah Khamenei devoted a section of his sermon on Friday to rebutting what he said were accusations of corruption leveled against Mr. Rafsanjani. But, he said, he believed President Ahmadinejad’s approach to foreign and social policy was “closer to what it should be.”

Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Michael Slackman contributed reporting from Cairo, and Neil MacFarquhar and Sharon Otterman from New York.

June 19, 2009, 7:56 am
Friday: Updates on Iran’s Disputed Election
By Robert Mackey
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/friday-updates-on-irans-disputed-election/
To supplement reporting by New York Times journalists inside Iran on Friday, The Lede will continue to track the aftermath of Iran’s disputed presidential election online, as we have for the last several days. Please refresh this page throughout the day to get the latest updates at the top of your screen (updates are stamped with the time in New York). For an overview of the current situation, read the main news article on our Web site, which will be updated throughout the day.

Readers inside Iran or in touch with people there are encouraged to send us photographs — our address is: pix@nyt.com — or use the comments box below to tell us what you are seeing or hearing.

Update | 11:08 a.m. Since opposition leaders decided to call off a planned protest during Friday prayers, some Iranian bloggers are pointing to video and photographs shot earlier this week to keep their momentum going online. One blogger uploaded this photograph to TwitPic on Friday of a Farsi-language placard the blogger translates as: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. Mahatma Gandhi.”

Other bloggers who seem to be writing from inside Iran point to this video, showing highlights from Mr. Moussavi’s campaign, which has been subtitled for English speakers:



Update | 11:02 a.m. A blogger who seems to be writing from Iran noted in two updates an hour ago on the Twitter feed Oxfordgirl that speculation is widespread that Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a senior cleric and former president of Iran, may not have appeared at Friday prayers in Tehran because he is working behind the scenes to overturn the election results:

Who not at Friday Prayers: Rafsanjani.

Where is Rafsanjani? He is organising the demise of Ahmadinejad.

Update | 10:52 a.m. In an article for The New Republic earlier this week, Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, looked more closely at the power struggle that seems to be unfolding inside Iran’s clerical establishment. Mr. Milani wrote that the country’s Supreme Leader may come to regret throwing his support so firmly behind Mr. Ahmadinejad:

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — whose rule has been absolute and whose words have been the law of the land–is facing the most public challenge to his authority. His two decades since succeeding Ayatollah Khomeini have been defined by a tendency to keep his options open, a verbal dexterity that allowed him to skirt tough political positions, and an appearance of impartiality in Iran’s fierce factional feuds. His caution has been the key to his success and survival.

But Khamenei has thrown this caution to the wind by unabashedly favoring Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Four years ago, his support was instrumental in getting the little-known Ahmadinejad elected president. Even as criticism of the president has been on the rise in the country over the past year, Khamenei reportedly promised Ahmadinejad and his cabinet four more years at the helm.

Mr. Milani added:

What makes this moment different from past incidents of confrontation between the regime and the people is that, this time, many pillars of the regime are part of the opposition. Aside from Mousavi, who was prime minister for eight years, Rafsanjani, former president Mohammad Khatami, former speaker of the parliament Mehdi Karubi, and many other past ministers and undersecretaries are now leading the movement demanding new elections. Moreover, since the demonstrators come from all walks of life, it is more difficult than in the past to accuse them of immaturity or youthful impertinence, or of falling prey to the designs of the “Great Satan.” [...]

The regime still has the capacity to contain the disgruntled demonstrators and maybe even co-opt their leadership. But the majestic power of large peaceful crowds, tasting the joys of victory embodied in acts of civil disobedience, and brought together by the power of technologies beyond the regime’s control, is sure to beget larger, more confident, and more disciplined crowds. When people defied Khamenei’s orders by gathering en masse on Monday, the regime’s armor of invincibility–so central to the regime’s authoritarian control–was cracked. Without it, the regime cannot survive, and reestablishing it can come only at the price of great bloodshed.

Update | 10:23 a.m. On the BBC’s dot.life technology blog, Rory Cellan-Jones posts this interesting look at how, and why, Iran’s Internet service may have been slowed but not stopped entirely.

Update | 9:59 a.m. Not all of our readers support the opposition, or our effort to report on events in Iran. Here is what a reader named Siyamak wrote in the comments thread below after Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech on Friday morning:

I heard Khamenei speak and I liked what he said which I found fair and balanced. Stop interfering with Iran!

Update | 9:55 a.m. One of our readers asks if The Times, by passing on messages about plans for opposition rallies is helping the Iranian authorities to block them. Obviously we have no first-hand knowledge of whether that is the case or not, but there are plenty of reports that suggest that Iran’s government is directly reading (and perhaps even writing) messages posted on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook by bloggers supporting the opposition movement in Iran. We also know that the rallies seem to have been organized, in part, through the use of these social-networking tools. It is also clear that each day some of the first and most powerful news of the rallies has come from the photographs and video posted online by anonymous users of these services.

The larger point, however, is that Iranian bloggers may be posting this information, often in English, on these sites precisely so that they can be easily picked up and reported by news organizations outside the control of Iran’s government. Whatever the thinking is, it is a fact that, given the nature of the Web, no information posted on these Web sites is private, whether it is described or reported on by news organizations or not. What we do know is that the people posting these messages on their anonymous social-networking accounts are making them public by doing so, and that they frequently ask that the messages be passed on. In a sense “re-tweeting” is a kind of reporting.

Importantly, we also have not seen any messages at all from bloggers who appear to be inside Iran asking that their text messages, photographs of video not be reported by news organizations. A reader of The Lede points out that one blogger writing on Twitter, under the alias Oxfordgirl, wrote earlier today in an update: “u can use my name in RTs.”

It would seem likely that if Iran’s opposition bloggers wanted to keep this information secret they would not post it online at all.

With that in mind, here is a message sent to us this morning by one of our readers, who uses the alias gb and says that he has been in touch with his family in Shiraz:

I talked to my mom today about yesterday’s sit-in in Shahe Cheraq.

She said the main problem is that it’s really hard to get the word out about where and they are meeting. She said she really didn’t know where untill an hour before and some people were arriving when the whole thing was ending.

They are going to meet tomorrow in Daneshjoo Square (formerly Alam square).

Here is video and a photograph of that protest on Thursday at the Shah-e-Cheraq shrine in Shiraz.

Update | 9:21 a.m. Since the Supreme Leader again stated on Friday that a partial recount of ballots is all that is required to settle this dispute, while the opposition says the whole process was tainted and demands a new vote, it might be worth looking at who will be doing the recount.

The New Republic pointed out this week that this man, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati Massah, “leads the Guardian Council, which runs elections and maintains the power to veto any parliamentary action it views as violating Islamic law.”

According to the New Republic’s description of him, it is not hard to understand why the opposition has little faith in a review led by him:

A hard-liner, he has called for America’s destruction multiple times, as well as George W. Bush’s decapitation. He formally endorsed Ahmadinejad, and he will run the Guardian Council’s election recount.

That information comes from a useful slide show on The New Republic’s Web site, which includes photographs and information on some of the key figures in Iran’s complex power structure who may right now be engaged in a struggle for control inside that labyrinth.

Update | 9:16 a.m. Two hours ago the blogger Persiankiwi, who has had consistently good information on the protests this week, reported via Twitter that another opposition rally is planned for Saturday:

Confirmed - Saturday Sea of Green rally - Enghelab Sq - 4pm - Mousavi, Karoubi and Khatami will attend -

Ten minutes ago the same source added:

confirmed - the Gov has refused to issue a permit for Sea of Green march at 4pm on Saturday in Tehran

Update | 9:10 a.m. The same YouTube channel that has the video of the singing at Thursday’s rally in Tehran also includes these two video clips of Mir Hussein Moussavi among his supporters:





Update | 9:07 a.m. As the opposition in Iran tries to remain united, they will point to video like this, apparently shot at Thursday’s mass rally in Tehran’s Imam Khomeni Square, of the crowd singing a patriotic song:



The YouTube user who uploaded this video says that points to this translation of the song’s lyrics on Wikipedia.

Update | 8:58 a.m. In an interview with Foreign policy magazine on Thursday, the Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who is speaking for Mr. Moussavi’s campaign in Europe, made this interesting comparison between the events of 1979 and 2009 on Iran’s streets:

There are some similarities and some differences. In both situations, people were in the streets. In the [earlier] revolution, there were young people in the streets who were not as modern as the people are today. And they were in the streets following the lead of a leader, a mullah — in those times Ayatollah Khomeini. Now, the young people in the streets are more modern: They use SMS; they use the Internet. And they are not being actually led by anyone, but they are connected to each other.

In an e-mail message sent to BBC Persian on Friday, subsequently translated from Farsi and posted online, an anonymous reader of that Web site who says he is one of the opposition protesters in Iran seemed to endorse Mr. Makhmalbaf’s reading:

Whether Mir Hossein Mousavi wants it or not, we will take our vote back. This is a youth movement, it’s our movement and we will not have these men [ie all the politicians] take credit. They are threatening us with violence and they are holding Mir Hossein [Mousavi] responsible. If one drop more blood is shed from anyone, the leader of the nation will be responsible.

Update | 8:54 a.m. Here is what one student in Tehran, identified only as Behrooz, told the BBC in response to Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech on Friday:

We all know that Mr Ahmadinejad did not get 24 million votes. But Ayatollah Khamenei has just repeated that statistic as true. There’s clearly a power struggle going on between Mr [Hashemi] Rafsanjani [a former president and head of an influential body which elects the supreme leader] and Mr Khamenei. I think in the end this can only be good for us, although I think today’s speech makes it more dangerous for us to protest.

We just have to keep the demonstrations so big that they cannot attack us. If the crowd is just 2,000 strong, they can scare us with 200 soldiers. But if we are a million, what can they do?

I don’t think the Guardian Council will agree to a new election. They don’t want to lose prestige. They will agree to a recount which gives the same result.

I voted for Mr [Mehdi] Karroubi because he was the one with the best plan to change this rotten system. Maybe nothing will change for now, but I do think this is the start of some sort of revolution. Hopefully not a destructive one like in 1979. As long as we are in the street, people will know we are not satisfied.

For the moment Mr Rafsanjani is silent, and we don’t know what he’s doing. But he’s a very powerful man. He’s the leader of the Assembly of Experts which selects supreme leader. He brought Khamenei to power, so he will be the one who brings him down.

Another response, on the BBC’s Web site, comes from computer programmer in Mashhad, identified as Arash, who said:

People are being beaten up in Mashhad. There have been no demonstrations in the past two days. People wait until night to go on the roofs and shout “Allahu akbar” ["God is great] to show their support for the opposition. People from here go to Tehran to demonstrate, to be part of the bigger, safer crowds.

Update | 8:42 a.m. In his sermon on Friday, Ayatollah Khamenei attacked what he called attempts by foreign governments to stir up opposition to the election results. He seemed to be saying that reports by foreign media outlets are actually veiled attempts to overthrow his regime. Reporting on what was in part an attack on the corporation itself, the BBC, which maintains an active Farsi-language news service, explained:

He said the election was a “political earthquake” for Iran’s enemies - singling out Great Britain as “the most evil of them” - whom he accused of trying to foment unrest in the country.

“Some of our enemies in different parts of the world intended to depict this absolute victory, this definitive victory, as a doubtful victory,” the Supreme Leader said.

In its own way, the BBC was quick to strike back - passing on reaction to the Supreme Leader’s speech from users of its Web site who claimed to be inside Iran.

Update | 8:38 a.m. In a post on Bits, the New York Times’s technology blog, Miguel Helft reports:

“There is a huge amount of interest about the events in Iran,” said Franz Och, principal scientist at Google, who has been leading the development of Google Translate. “We hope that this tool will improve access to information in Iran and outside,” Mr. Och said in an interview. [...]

In a blog post, Mr. Och warned that the service is not perfect, so mistakes are possible. It is optimized to translate between Persian and English, but Google is working on improving translation between Persian and the other languages in Google Translate.

Update | 8:30 a.m. The automatic translation tool introdcued by Google on Friday was quickly used by supporters of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi. One hour ago, Mousavi1388, a Twitter feed maintained by opposition supporters, reported:

Mousavi’s official news site GhalamNews in now available in English thanks to @GOOGLE, see http://is.gd/16b2j

In reference to reports from Twitter that we cite, we should note that, after consulting several experts, The Times has decided to include the user names for the Twitter posts that are quoted here and elsewhere on NYTimes.com. We concluded that the user names would better allow readers to judge the source and value of the posts that are quoted. The user names are already publicly available on Twitter and accessible, along with all content created on Twitter, through Twitter’s search index and on any number of third-party search engines.

Update | 8:20 a.m. Iran’s authorities are no doubt hoping that images broadcast on Iranian state television this morning, of the Supreme Leader speaking to a large number of loyal followers at Tehran University — including incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — will give many Iranian citizens the impression that the opposition protests are doomed to failure. Largely shut out by state television, and barred from speaking to the foreign press, the opposition will continue to rely on citizen journalists within the movement to get word of its protests out to other Iranians and the world through the Internet.

To that end, their efforts may be aided by the introduction of two new tools from Google and Facebook, announced on Friday. Google has sped up the release of automatic translation software that will help with translations of Internet messages to and from Farsi. On Google’s official blog, the company explained:

Today, we added Persian (Farsi) to Google Translate. This means you can now translate any text from Persian into English and from English into Persian — whether it’s a news story, a website, a blog, an email, a tweet or a Facebook message. The service is available free at http://translate.google.com.

We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa — increasing everyone’s access to information.

Pointing to the importance of their social-networking site in Iran, Facebook announced that they have made the entire site available to users who speak no English:

Since the Iranian election last week, people around the world have increasingly been sharing news and information on Facebook about the results and its aftermath. Much of the content created and shared has been in Persian—the native language of Iran—but people have had to navigate the site in English or other languages.

Today we’re making the entire site available in a beta version of Persian, so Persian speakers inside of Iran and around the world can begin using it in their native language.

If your browser is set to Persian, you should automatically see the Persian version of Facebook.

Update | 8:11 a.m. According to a Reuters report, there were tens of thousands “gathered in and around Tehran University to hear Khamenei’s Friday prayer sermon.” The news agency added:

People chanting slogans and holding posters of Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, the father of the 1979 Islamic revolution, packed streets outside the university.

Update | 8:00 a.m. Iran’s Press TV, an English-language satellite channel financed by the Iranian government, reports that the nation’s Supreme Leader made no concessions after days of massive street protests:

Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said high turnout in the election, which witnessed more than 40 million Iranians casting their votes, was a great manifestation of people’s solidarity with the Islamic establishment. Addressing Friday prayers congregation, Ayatollah Khamenei said that last Friday’s election indicated a ‘common sense of responsibility’ of the Iranian nation to determine the future of the country. [...]

The Leader said the high voter turnout in the election was a ‘political quake’ for the enemy and a ‘real celebration’ for the friends of the country. “The Islamic Republic of Iran will by no means betray the votes of the nation,” the Leader said, adding the legal system of the election will not allow any ballot rigging in Iran.

Ayatollah Khamenei, however, maintained that the Guardian Council, the body tasked with overseeing the election, would look into the complaints of the candidates who are unhappy with the election results.

The Leader also added that the establishment would never give-in to illegal demands, urging all presidential candidates to pursue their complaints through legal channels. Ayatollah Khamenei called for an end to illegal street protests aimed at reversing the result of the election.

Update | 7:54 a.m. The BBC has this video of Ayatollah Khamenei’s stern rebuke to the protesters on Friday, which was broadcast by Iranian state television.

Update | 7:51 a.m. As Nazila Fathi reports from Tehran, Iran’s ruling cleric took a firm stand against the opposition protests during a televised sermon on Friday:

In his first public response to days of protests, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sternly warned opponents Friday to stay off the streets and denied opposition claims that last week’s disputed election was rigged, praising the ballot as an “epic moment that became a historic moment.”

In a somber and lengthy sermon at Friday prayers in Tehran, he called directly for an end to the protests by hundreds of thousands of Iranians demanding a new election.

“Street challenge is not acceptable,” Ayatollah Khamenei said. “This is challenging democracy after the elections.” He said opposition leaders would be “held responsible for chaos” if they did not end the protests.

Justices Rule Inmates Don’t Have Right to DNA Tests

June 19, 2009
By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/us/19scotus.html?_r=1&hp

WASHINGTON — Convicts do not have a right under the Constitution to obtain DNA testing to try to prove their innocence after being found guilty, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.

In a 5-to-4 decision, the court found against William G. Osborne, a convicted rapist from Alaska. But the decision does not necessarily mean that many innocent prisoners will languish in their cells without access to DNA testing, since Alaska is one of only a few states without a law granting convicts at least some access to the new technology.

“DNA testing has an unparalleled ability both to exonerate the wrongly convicted and to identify the guilty,” the majority conceded, in an opinion written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. “The availability of new DNA testing, however, cannot mean that every criminal conviction, or even every conviction involving biological evidence, is suddenly in doubt.”

In addition, the majority reasoned, it is not so much up to the federal courts as it is to the state legislatures to establish rules “to harness DNA’s power to prove innocence without unnecessarily overthrowing the established criminal justice system.”

The majority appeared to have been influenced by the fact that 46 states and the federal government have enacted laws that allow some inmates access to DNA testing, and there is nothing to prevent the remaining states from changing their laws. In addition to Alaska, Alabama, Massachusetts and Oklahoma do not explicitly allow the testing.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a dissent expressing his dismay that the majority had chosen to approve of Alaska’s denial of the evidence sought by the defendant. “The DNA test Osborne seeks is a simple one, its cost modest, and its results uniquely precise,” Justice Stevens said.

Since 1992, 238 people in the United States, some who were sitting on death row, have been exonerated of crimes through DNA testing. In many of those cases, the DNA testing used to clear them was not available at the time of the crime.

But several aspects of the Osborne case did not make the defendant a sympathetic one, so perhaps his case was not the ideal vehicle for those hoping that the nation’s highest court would find a constitutional right to “post-conviction” DNA testing — that is, after the normal appeals have been exhausted.

The victim in the Osborne case was a prostitute who was raped, beaten with an ax handle, shot in the head and left in a snow bank near Anchorage International Airport in 1993. She recalled that a condom was used in the assault against her, and one was found near the scene. An ax handle similar to the one used to club the victim was found in the defendant’s room.

The victim identified Mr. Osborne as one of her assailants, and he was also incriminated by another man who was found guilty in the attack.

Moreover, Mr. Osborne later confessed to the Alaska parole board, which released him after he had served 14 years of a 26-year prison term for kidnapping, assault and sexual assault. Later, the defendant said he confessed not because he was guilty, but in the hope of getting out of prison sooner. After his parole Mr. Osborne was convicted of a home invasion and is awaiting sentence for that crime.

Thursday’s ruling in District Attorney’s Office v. Osborne, No. 08-6, reversed a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Joining Chief Justice Roberts in the majority were Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

The dissenters, besides Justice Stevens, were Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and David H. Souter.

A paradox in the case, at least to a layman, is the fact that Mr. Osborne’s lawyer at the time of the trial declined to pursue the most advanced DNA testing available — for fear, she acknowledged later, that it would prove his guilt.

Even though the latest DNA testing could establish whether the defendant raped the prostitute, attorneys on both sides have sometimes spoken ambiguously, or at least without iron-clad clarity.

When the case was argued on March 2, Kenneth M. Rosenstein, an assistant state attorney general, said that an Alaska law governing post-conviction relief could allow Mr. Osborne access to DNA evidence if he would swear to his innocence.

But would he?

“I assume he certainly would,” said his lawyer, Peter Neufeld.

But Mr. Rosenstein declined to say whether the state would resist the defendant even if he did so swear.

Justice Scalia said he was struck by the absence of a full-throated declaration of innocence from the defendant, and quoted from a sworn statement Mr. Osborne had submitted to the state courts: “I have no doubt whatsoever that retesting of the condom will prove once and for all time...”

Here, Justice Scalia observed, a listener would expect to hear the words “my innocence.” But the defendant did not say that, saying instead “either my guilt or innocence.”

Mr. Neufeld, a co-founder of The Innocence Project, which works to free wrongly convicted prisoners, issued a statement on Thursday calling the ruling “deeply flawed and disappointing,” but predicting that it may not have wide effect.

“Most people who need DNA testing to prove their innocence will not be affected by today’s ruling, but the small number of people who are impacted may suffer greatly,” he Neufeld said. “As a result of this decision, more innocent people will languish in prison and some may die in prison because they were prevented from proving their innocence.”

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also issued a statement expressing disappointment,

“We should make every effort to promote DNA testing in our criminal justice system — whether before or after trial — in order to help ensure that only the guilty are convicted, never the innocent, and that the guilty do not walk free to commit more crimes,” said Mr. Leahy, a former prosecutor.

New Protest Builds as Iran Expands Its Crackdown

June 18, 2009
By NAZILA FATHI and SHARON OTTERMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/world/middleeast/18iran.html?_r=1&hp

TEHRAN — Tens of thousands of protesters massed in central Iran again Wednesday to demonstrate against the disputed presidential election, as the government expanded its crackdown on journalists to try to block their coverage of opposition activities.

The protesters marched silently down a major thoroughfare, some holding photographs of the main opposition candidate in Friday’s vote, Mir Hussein Moussavi. Others lifted their bare hands high in the air, signifying their support for Mr. Moussavi with green ribbons tied around their wrists or holding their fingers in a victory sign.

The scope and description of the demonstration was provided by participants who were reached by telephone, as well as photographs taken by participants and journalists, despite warnings by the authorities against reporting on the event. All accredited journalists in Iran have been ordered to remain in their offices.

It was the fifth day of unrest since election officials declared a landslide victory for the incumbent, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, summoned the Swiss ambassador, who represents American interests in Tehran, to complain of “interventionist” statements by American officials, state-run media reported. America and Iran broke off diplomatic relations after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

President Obama said a day earlier that it would be counterproductive for the United States “to be seen as meddling.” But he has also said he was “deeply troubled by the violence” in Iran and that democratic values needed to be observed.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry officials, without being specific about which comments they were reacting to, expressed displeasure, the official IRNA news agency reported. The Canadian chargé d’affaires was also summoned.

Despite the government’s attempts to block communications among the opposition, calls for more mass defiance continued.

In a message on a Web site associated with him, Mr. Moussavi called on his supporters to rally again on Thursday, and to go to their local mosques to mourn protesters killed in the demonstrations, officially numbering seven. His call directly challenged Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had urged Mr. Moussavi to work through the country’s electoral system in contesting the election results.

Iranians using the Internet messaging service Twitter had already spread the word about the silent demonstration Wednesday.

The sense of threat against the opposition was growing. Reuters reported that Mohammadreza Habibi, the senior prosecutor in the central province of Isfahan, had warned demonstrators that they could be executed under Islamic law.

“We warn the few elements controlled by foreigners who try to disrupt domestic security by inciting individuals to destroy and to commit arson that the Islamic penal code for such individuals waging war against God is execution,” Mr. Habibi said, according to the Fars news agency. It was not clear if his warning applied only to Isfahan, where there have been violent clashes, or the country as a whole, Reuters said.

The government’s new restrictions were directed at blocking communications between opposition supporters and any news coverage of their activities.

The Associated Press reported that the powerful Revolutionary Guards threatened to restrict the digital online media that many Iranians use to communicate among themselves and to send news of their protests overseas. In a first statement since last Friday’s vote, the Revolutionary Guards said Wednesday that Iranian Web site operators and bloggers must remove content deemed to “create tension” or face legal action, The A.P. said.

In Paris, Soazig Dollet, a spokeswoman for Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom advocacy group, said at least 11 reporters had been arrested since the elections and the fate of 10 more was unclear since they may either be in hiding or under arrest.

On its Web site, the organization said Aldolfatah Soltani, a lawyer and human rights activist, had been detained along with “10 or so opposition activists, politicians and civil society figures” in Tehran and three other cities — Tabriz, Isfahan and Shiraz.

On Tuesday, the government revoked press credentials for foreign journalists and ordered journalists not to report from the streets. On Wednesday, government officials telephoned or sent faxes to reporters in Tehran working for foreign news organizations ordering them not to venture outside to cover events being held without an official permit. That included rallies by supporters of Mr. Moussavi and news conferences or other public events held without the government’s approval, reporters in Tehran said. At least one newspaper has stopped printing.

Government officials told journalists that they were at risk on the streets following an incident on Tuesday when a photographer was stabbed and wounded while covering a rally. Two well-known analysts, Sayeed Leylaz and Mohammad-Reza Jalaipour, were detained Wednesday and were likely to be held for several days, associates and family members said.

Defying the restrictions, new amateur video surfaced outside of Iran on Wednesday, apparently showing a government militia rampaging through a dormitory area of Tehran University late Tuesday or early Wednesday.

Support for the protests came from some unusual quarters. Five Iranian soccer players, including the captain, Ali Karimi, wore green wristbands in an apparent sign of support for Mr. Moussavi at a World Cup Asian qualifying match in South Korea, The A.P. said, quoting state television.

The Fars news agency also reported that the partial recount of votes ordered Tuesday by the Guardian Council, the 12-member body of jurists which supervises elections and holds veto power over legislation in Iran, had begun. A recount of votes in Kermanshah, a Kurdish province, showed that “there has been no irregularity,” the news agency reported.

The recount, intended as a effort to meet the opposition’s concerns, has failed to halt the unrest. On Tuesday, a large protest by thousands of supporters of Mr. Moussavi stretched for miles along a major thoroughfare in Tehran. The marchers, dressed largely in black and green, marched mostly in silence, some carrying signs in English asking, “Where is my vote?”

Despite the media crackdown, extraordinary accounts about the protests in Tehran and other cities have reached the outside world. On Tuesday, many Web sites posted a wrenching video that purported to show the shooting death of a student in Isfahan in a shooting by pro-government militia members. Other videos showed limp and bleeding demonstrators in Tehran after the unprecedented protests of hundreds of thousands on Monday.

Worry over the future of Iran, a country crucially important for its oil, its proximity to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, its nuclear program and its ties to extremist groups, spilled over its borders.

In Vienna, Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the United Nations atomic energy watchdog, said in a BBC interview that he believed Iran wanted to develop nuclear weapons technology “to be recognized as a major power in the Middle East.”

Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran and Sharon Otterman from New York. Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris.

Netanyahu Backs Palestinian State, With Caveats

June 15, 2009
By ISABEL KERSHNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/world/middleeast/15mideast.html?hp

JERUSALEM — The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, on Sunday endorsed for the first time the principle of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but on condition that the state was demilitarized and that the Palestinians recognized Israel as the state of the Jewish people.

In a much-anticipated speech meant in part as an answer to President Obama’s address in Cairo on June 4, Mr. Netanyahu reversed his longstanding opposition to Palestinian statehood, a move seen as a concession to American pressure.

But he firmly rejected American demands for a complete freeze on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the subject of a rare public dispute between Israel and its most important ally on an issue seen as critical to peace negotiations.

And even his assent on Palestinian statehood, given the caveats, was immediately rejected as a nonstarter by Palestinians.

In a half-hour speech broadcast live in Israel, Mr. Netanyahu, the leader of the conservative Likud Party, laid out what he called his “vision of peace”: “In this small land of ours, two peoples live freely, side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect. Each will have its own flag, its own national anthem, its own government. Neither will threaten the security or survival of the other.”

But Mr. Netanyahu insisted on “ironclad” guarantees from the United States and the international community for Palestinian demilitarization and recognition of Israel’s Jewish character.

Given those conditions, Mr. Netanyahu said, “We will be ready in a future peace agreement to reach a solution where a demilitarized Palestinian state exists alongside the Jewish state.” He also said that no new settlements would be created and no more land would be expropriated for expansion, but that “normal life” must be allowed to continue in the settlements, a term he has used to mean that limited building should be allowed to continue within existing settlements to accommodate “natural growth.”

While this position did not diverge from Mr. Netanyahu’s previous statements, he delivered it on Sunday in the context of a speech he had billed as a major foreign policy address, one he had personally urged Mr. Obama to watch. It came 10 days after Mr. Obama bluntly rejected “the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements” in his address to the Muslim world in Cairo.

The White House reaction was positive, if limited, focusing on what it called “the important step forward” of Mr. Netanyahu’s support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In a statement, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, reiterated the president’s vow for a two-state solution that “can and must ensure both Israel’s security and the fulfillment of the Palestinians’ legitimate aspirations for a viable state,” and he said that Mr. Obama “welcomes Prime Minister Netanyahu’s endorsement of that goal.”

Indeed, in moving closer to the American and international consensus for a two-state solution, Mr. Netanyahu risked alienating right-wing ideologues within his party and his governing coalition. Ron Dermer, the prime minister’s director of communications and policy planning, said that in accepting the notion of a Palestinian state, Mr. Netanyahu had “crossed a personal Rubicon.”

Citing the biblical vision of Isaiah of swords beaten into plowshares, Mr. Netanyahu said of the Palestinians, “We do not want to rule over them, to govern their lives, or to impose our flag or our culture on them.”

But beyond the idea of a state, he seemed to offer little room for compromise or negotiation.

He referred repeatedly to the West Bank, the territory presumed to comprise the bulk of a future Palestinian state, by its biblical name of Judea and Samaria, declaring it “the land of our forefathers.”

Mr. Netanyahu made no mention of existing frameworks for negotiations, like the American-backed 2003 peace plan known as the road map.

He did not address the geographical area a Palestinian state might cover, and he said that the Palestinian refugee problem must be resolved outside Israel’s borders, negating the Palestinian demand for a right of return for refugees of the 1948 war and for their millions of descendants.

He insisted that Jerusalem remain united as the Israeli capital. The Palestinians demand the eastern part of the city as a future capital.

“Benjamin Netanyahu spoke about negotiations, but left us with nothing to negotiate as he systematically took nearly every permanent status issue off the table,” Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian negotiator, said in a statement. “Nor did he accept a Palestinian state. Instead, he announced a series of conditions and qualifications that render a viable, independent and sovereign Palestinian state impossible.”

Palestinian negotiators have long refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, contending that it would prejudge the refugees’ demand for a right of return and would be detrimental to the status of Israel’s Arab minority.

Mr. Dermer, the communications director for Mr. Netanyahu, said that Palestinians’ recognition of Israel as a Jewish state was “not a precondition” for negotiations. But, he said, “there will not be an agreement without that recognition.”

Mr. Netanyahu delivered his speech to an invited audience at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv. The university is an academic bastion of Israel’s national-religious camp.

Timed to coincide with the Israeli evening television news, the speech was rich in Zionist rhetoric and seemed aimed as much at Israelis as at the Obama administration. Experts said it was unlikely to cause a political earthquake here, since it largely expressed the consensus in Israel.

“It was a balanced speech that the coalition can live with,” said Prof. Efraim Inbar, the director of the Begin-Sadat Center.

Contrary to the expectations of many here, Mr. Netanyahu did not make the threat of a nuclear Iran a focal point, though he described it as one of the greatest challenges facing Israel, along with the global economic crisis and forging of peace.

He called on Arab leaders to meet with him to discuss peace, and for Arab countries and entrepreneurs to help in lifting the Palestinian economy and to engage in regional projects with Israel.

Regarding Gaza, where the militant Islamic movement Hamas holds sway, Mr. Netanyahu said it is up to the Western-backed Palestinian Authority to establish the rule of law there and “overcome” the group.

Mr. Netanyahu announced a week ago that he would deliver a major policy speech, leading to feverish speculation up to the last minute of what it would contain. The Israeli leader spent much of the last week in consultation with political partners and potential rivals and met twice with the country’s experienced and popular president, Shimon Peres.

Mr. Peres said in a statement that the speech was “true and courageous” and that it constituted an opening toward “direct negotiations for both a regional peace and a bilateral peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”

Top Cleric Calls for Inquiry as Protesters Defy Ban in Iran

June 16, 2009
By ROBERT F. WORTH and NAZILA FATHI
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/world/middleeast/16iran.html?_r=1&hp

TEHRAN — Hundreds of thousands of people marched in silence through central Tehran on Monday to protest Iran’s disputed presidential election in an extraordinary show of defiance that appeared to be the largest anti-government demonstration in Iran since the 1979 revolution.

The march began hours after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called for a inquiry into opposition claims that the election was rigged in favor of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The ayatollah’s call — announced every 15 minutes on Iranian state radio throughout the day — was the first sign that Iran’s top leadership might be rethinking its position on the election. Mr. Khamenei announced Saturday that the election results showing a landslide victory for Mr. Ahmadinejad were fair, but on Sunday he met with Mir Hussein Moussavi, the former prime minister and moderate who was the main opposition candidate, to listen to his concerns.

As evening fell, Iranian state television reported that shots had been fired at protesters, and Reuters, quoting an Iranian photographer, reported that the gunfire had apparently come from a compound used by the pro-government Basij militia. At least one person was reported to have been killed.

It was impossible to independently confirm these reports, which came after a day during which government security forces stood by at the edges of the avenues, allowing the demonstrators to stream past.

The silent march was a deliberate and striking contrast with the chaos of the past few days, when riot police sprayed tear gas and wielded clubs to disperse scattered bands of angry and frightened young people. In Isfahan, south of the capital, more violence broke out on Monday, with police attacking a crowd of several thousand opposition protestors with sticks and tear gas, and rioters setting fires in parts of the city.

The broad river of people in Tehran — young and old, dressed in traditional Islamic gowns and the latest Western fashions — marched slowly from Revolution Square to Freedom Square for more than three hours, many of them wearing the signature bright green ribbons of Mr. Moussavi’s campaign, and holding up their hands in victory signs. When the occasional shout or chant went up, the crowd quickly hushed them, and some held up signs bearing the word “silence.”

“These people are not seeking a revolution,” said Ali Reza, a young actor in a brown T-shirt who stood for a moment watching on the rally’s sidelines. “We don’t want this regime to fall. We want our votes to be counted, because we want reforms, we want kindness, we want friendship with the world.”

Mr. Moussavi, who had called for the rally Sunday but never received official permission for it, joined the crowd, as did Mohammad Khatami, the reformist former president. But the crowd was so vast, and communications had been so sporadic — the authorities have cut off phone and text-messaging services repeatedly in recent days — that many marchers seemed unaware they were there.

“We don’t really have a leader,” said Mahdiye, a 20-year-old student. “Moussavi wants to do something, but they won’t let him. It is dangerous for him, and we don’t want to lose him. We don’t know how far this will go.”

The protestors said they would continue, with another major rally planned for Tuesday. But it was too soon to tell whether Mr. Khamenei’s decision to launch a probe, or the government’s decision to let the silent rally proceed, would change the election results. Many in the crowd said they believed the government was simply buying time, and hoping the protests would dissipate, as smaller protest movements have in 1999 and 2003.

“Anything is possible,” said Hamid, a 50-year-old financial adviser who, like many protesters, declined to give his last name because he feared repercussions. “If the people insist on this movement, if it continues here and in other parts of Iran, the pressure will build — and maybe Ahmedinejad will be forced to resign.”

In Washington, a State Department spokesman, Ian Kelly, said the United States is “deeply troubled” by the unrest in Iran and is concerned about allegations of ballot fraud. But he stopped short of condemning the Iran security forces for cracking down on demonstrators and said Washington does not know whether the allegations of fraud are, in fact, true.

In Moscow, meanwhile, an official at the Iranian Embassy said that Mr. Ahmadinejad had delayed a visit to Russia that was to have started Monday. The meeting, in Yekaterinburg, is of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that includes Russia, China and four Central Asian countries. He now plans to travel on Tuesday, the official said.

As concern about the vote spread among Western governments, the European Union’s 27 member states planned to issue a joint call on Iran to clarify the election outcome, Reuters reported. The French government summoned the Iranian ambassador to register concern about the fairness of the vote, and Germany planned to follow suit.

The Spanish foreign minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, told reporters in Luxembourg, “There is a need to clarify the situation and to express our concern that a sector of the population are having difficulties in expressing its opinion.” In Berlin, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany called for a “transparent examination” of reports of irregularities.

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said he had been “closely following the situation” and welcomed the announcement that there would be some manner of investigation. “The genuine will of the Iranian people should be fully respected,” he said.

Earlier, Reuters said stick-wielding supporters of Mr. Ahmadinejad clashed with marching backers of Mr. Moussavi. Other reports said some of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s followers paraded outside the British and French Embassies in Tehran following remarks by political leaders in London and Paris casting doubt on the Iranian leadership’s conduct.

There were reports of considerable violence overnight on Sunday, as opposition Web sites reported that security forces raided a dormitory at Tehran University and 15 people were injured. Between 150 and 200 students were arrested, by these accounts, but there was no immediate confirmation of the incident from the authorities. There were also reports of official action against students in the cities of Esfahan, Shiraz and Tabriz.

Iran’s Interior Ministry announced on Saturday that Mr. Ahmadinejad had won about 63 percent of the vote, after a hard-fought election campaign and the rise of a broad reform-oriented opposition that clearly had rattled Iran’s ruling elite. Opposition leaders have catalogued a list of what they call election violations and irregularities in the vote, which most observers had expected to go to a second-round runoff.

Opposition members from all the major factions were arrested late Saturday and Sunday and included the brother of a former president, Mohammad Khatami, opposition Web sites reported. Some were released after several hours.

In a press conference on Sunday, Mr. Ahmadinejad had dismissed the protestors as soccer hooligans who had lost a match, in a comment that appears to have stoked their determination.

“People feel really insulted, and nothing is worse than that,” said Azi, a 48-year-old woman in an elegant yellow headscarf who participated in the massive Monday rally. “We won’t let the regime buy time, we will hold another march tomorrow.”

At nightfall, as people moved off the streets amid reports of violence, large numbers of Tehranis took to their roofs for a second night, chanting “God is great!” and “Death to the dictator!” in neighborhoods across the city.

Reporting was contributed by Clifford J. Levy from Moscow, Alan Cowell from Paris, Sharon Otterman from New York, Victor Homola from Berlin, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.

Review: Garbage Dreams

WorldChanging Team
June 11, 2009 9:37 AM
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009977.html

By Carissa Bluestone

In the first few minutes of Garbage Dreams, after being informed that Cairo has no citywide waste-removal system, we get an aerial view of Mokattam, the city’s largest “garbage village.” Any surface not draped with hanging laundry is piled high with the waste collected by 60,000 Zaballeen, Cairo’s informal sanitation workers.

“Recycling village” is more accurate: In ad hoc workshops cloth is ground down to pulp and plastic is shredded into confetti. This raw material is then brokered through middlemen to foreign markets that don't have strict standards on reusing low-grade materials.

The film follows three boys (Adham, 17, Nabil, 18, and Osama, 16), and Laila, a social worker and teacher at the village’s Recycling School. We meet the Zaballeen in the midst of crisis: Cairo’s decision a few years ago to outsource waste management to contractors from Italy and Spain has seriously threatened the Zaballeen’s livelihood. At one point, Nabil estimates that the foreign companies have reduced his haul by 75 percent.

Garbage Dreams has been getting a lot of attention since its March premiere at South by Southwest -- in April, director Mai Iskander accepted the 2009 REEL Current Award at the Nashville Film Festival from none other than Al Gore. Iskander certainly deserves praise for giving a voice to a community that is at once a vital part of a megacity’s ecology and a marginalized target of scorn, but it’s her first feature, and not without its weaknesses. The focus on the boys’ coming-of-age woes, though compelling, means there isn’t a lot of space for data; at times the grousing about the “foreign companies” seems a bit vague and it's difficult to understand just how the whole system works. The government’s unwillingness to incorporate the Zaballeen into their plan is no secret (read about the controversy here, here and here), and the subsequent failures of their short-sighted approach have been similarly well documented, but without the perspective of the decision-makers or of third parties, we're missing an analysis of whether a program that relied solely on retraining the Zaballeen would actually solve Cairo’s growing garbage problem. Lastly, although it’s clear the Zaballeen feel disrespected by the government and by Cairo society, we don’t get the full picture of the institutionalized racism that these mainly Coptic Christian people face. (A point that has much recent significance: In the wake of the swine flu panic, the Egyptian government ordered the culling of all pigs in Cairo — most of which belonged to the Zaballeen and were the key mechanism in disposing of the organic waste collected.)

What Garbage Dreams does really well, however, is showcase the enthusiasm and ingenuity of the Zaballeen, who have counterparts in almost every megacity. The younger generation is resentful of the government’s dismissal of their recycling expertise (the film estimates that the Zaballeen recycle 80 percent of garbage collected, whereas the multinational companies recycle a paltry 20 percent). They are clear-eyed about the need to modernize their techniques in order to remain part of the solution. Mokattam’s Recycling School, a product of UNESCO funding and Proctor & Gamble-sponsored microloans, not only teaches safe recycling practices, but also literacy and the skills necessary to create and grow businesses: how to read maps, use computers, and understand contracts. The school is currently raising funds to secure a permanent space and expand the campus in order to include the education of girls. In one of the film’s best segments, Nabil and Adham travel to Swansea, Wales on a sponsored program to glean lessons from a modern recycling system. The trip yields a revelation — source separation — which Adham explains at a community meeting. It is quickly adopted as a first step towards modernization, and the group goes door to door persuading their clients to presort organic and nonorganic waste.

The film works equally well as an expose on the “squalor” of a garbage village and an unsentimental slice of Global South life, but the larger significance of Garbage Dreams is the missed opportunities inherent in globalizing waste management. Cairo has been underserved by its multinational contractors — the only one that’s had a reasonably smooth run is an Italian company that has tried to incorporate the existing Zaballeen systems. In the meantime, most of the Zaballeen are barely scraping by -- having been unable to regain the licenses and prized routes they used to work; many resort to scavenging, which is technically illegal. (In this way, the film tangentially brings up the question: Who owns our garbage? The Zaballeen, with their decades years of garbage collection traditions, and life among discarded shampoo bottles and shredded plastic bags can certainly assert figurative ownership of Cairo’s waste; however, when the multinationals show up that ownership is perfunctorily transferred.)

If, when creating its waste-removal system, the city had tapped the immense community capital on its outskirts, where would Cairo be right now? How much more efficient would the city be at trash removal, and how much more optimistic would the Zaballeen be regarding their community’s place in the 21st century?

Carissa Bluestone is a freelance editor based in Seattle. She was a contributer to Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century.

Hate Crimes and Extremist Politics

Personally, I can not even believe that this is a real conversation, and I've seen it on CNN as well. Would restricting people's civil rights really make them act any different? No, it would only make them act out more in defense of what they are losing. Extreme actions are the reasons there are more terrorist attacks in other countries, because non-violent options like communicating have been restricted. Sure there are nutbags, but there always will be and there isn't any way to stop that! Do I personally like hate speech? No, I believe in allowing people to live their lives as best befits their belief system, but the idea of the government defining what speech is lawful and what isn't terrifies me! If we can't talk than we are no better than extremists who have given up speaking for violent actions.

June 11, 2009, 12:29 pm
BY: The Editors
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/hate-crimes-and-extremist-politics/

The killing of George Tiller, the abortion doctor in Wichita, Kan., and the attack on the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington yesterday have raised questions yet again about the role that extremist propaganda sites play in inciting violence among some militant believers. In both cases, the suspect arrested was well-known among fringe “communities” on the Web.

Most legal scholars and many experts on extremist violence in the U.S. oppose reining in of such sites, or restrictions on extremist speech generally. Should the United States consider tighter restrictions on hate speech? In the meantime, how should law enforcement agencies respond?


Phyllis B. Gerstenfeld, criminal justice professor
Chip Berlet, Political Research Associates
Eric Hickey, criminology professor
Edward J. Eberle, comparative law professor
Eugene O’Donnell, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Don’t Overreact
Phyllis B. Gerstenfeld is a professor and chairman of the criminal justice department at California State University, Stanislaus. She is the author of “Hate Crimes: Causes, Controls and Controversies.”


Although violent extremism is nothing new, either in the United States or abroad, it continues to present several daunting challenges to those who wish to prevent it.

Some of those challenges are legal. It is often difficult to balance the protection of civil liberties, especially freedom of expression, with the desire to avoid bloodshed. Those charged with enforcing the laws have sometimes overstepped the bounds of their authority—and have infringed upon First Amendment rights—when they have attempted to investigate or silence extremists.

Some challenges are policy related. How many resources ought to be allocated to fighting the terrible but uncommon instances of hate-fueled violence? Furthermore, a very large majority of those who attack others because of their victims’ race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or other characteristics are not hard-core bigots who join supremacist groups or expound their views in websites or manifestos. Even if we could somehow focus effectively on people like James Von Brunn or Scott Roeder, most bias crimes would continue unchecked.

In recent years, extremist propaganda has been cloaked so as to appear more mainstream and less radical.
And some challenges are empirical. We still know only a little bit about what factors influence a small number of people to act on their hatreds. There is, unfortunately, no shortage of extremist propaganda. In recent years, much of that propaganda has been cloaked so as to appear more mainstream and less radical. Some white supremacist groups claim that they don’t hate anybody, they simply love white people. Extremist political parties that recently won seats in the European Parliament did so on anti-immigration and economic platforms not very different from those of the more conventional parties. It is unclear to what extent extremist rhetoric, whether veiled or not, inspires violent behavior.

One thing that ought to be remembered is that attacks like the murder of George Tiller and the shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum are rare. We should take care not to rush blindly into creating “solutions” that are ill-suited to the real problems, that result in poor distributions of scarce resources, or that violate basic freedoms.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Link Between Theory and Violent Action
Chip Berlet is a senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a group based in Somerville, Mass., that studies extremist and authoritarian movements. He is co–author, with Matthew N. Lyons, of “Right-Wing Populism in America.”

The alleged shooter at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum spread historical white supremacist views and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories through a Web site that included the hoax document “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and a link to a Holocaust denial Web site.

The attack demonstrates why it is a mistake to ignore bigoted conspiracy theories. Law enforcement needs to enforce laws against criminal behavior. Vicious bigoted speech, however, is often protected by the First Amendment. We do not need new laws or to encourage government agencies to further erode our civil liberties. We need to stand up as moral people and speak out against the spread of bigoted conspiracy theories. That’s not a police problem, that’s our problem as people responsible for defending a free society.

Demagogues and conspiracy theorists use the same four “tools of fear.” These are 1) dualism; 2) scapegoating; 3) demonization; and 4) apocalyptic aggression.

It is the combination of demagogic demonization and widespread scapegoating that is so dangerous.

The basic dynamics remain the same no matter the ideological leanings of the demonizers or the identity of their targets. It is the combination of demagogic demonization and widespread scapegoating that is so dangerous. In such circumstances, angry allegations can quickly turn into apocalyptic aggression and violence targeting scapegoated groups like Jews or immigrants. Meanwhile, our ability to resolve disputes through civic debate and compromise is hobbled.

Apocalyptic aggression is fueled by right-wing pundits who demonize scapegoated groups and individuals in our society, implying that it is urgent to stop them from wrecking the nation. Some angry people in their audience already believe conspiracy theories in which the same scapegoats are portrayed as subversive, destructive or evil. Add in aggressive apocalyptic ideas that suggest time is running out and quick action mandatory, and you have a perfect storm of mobilized resentment threatening to rain bigotry and violence across the United States.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Infiltrate and Monitor Hate Groups
Eric Hickey is a professor in the Department of Criminology, California State University, Fresno.

Unlike the more common mass murderers in American society who usually are individually motivated by mental illness to kill, extremists have their own niche of chaos. To date, acts of hate murder (akin to random acts of hate violence where killing does not occur) are sporadically committed by only a handful of offenders yet they represent groups of individuals who share common hatred toward other groups based upon religious beliefs, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.

What can be done to identify extremists who may be preparing to carry out acts of violence? We need to do a better job of infiltrating and monitoring their groups. Police often are aware of such individuals because they are vocal and do not hide their hate, and they often use the Internet or even hold public rallies to espouse their views. It’s during times of economic stress and social and political change that hate groups tend to attract those who feel marginalized or threatened.

In our democratic society we pride ourselves on being allowed the freedom to gather and espouse whatever we wish so long as we do not incite others to commit acts of violence. But we also, as a society, have the right to monitor such groups to ensure public safety.

The problem in doing that is we create a less democratic society. Or, we can provide more security for potential targets and institute gun control measures like those in Canada and England. Neither of these options, however, will do much to stop violent acts, even though they give us a greater sense of security.

Another approach is to create more public awareness of these groups and solicit public assistance in identifying anyone who may be at risk for acting out. But these “big brother” campaigns serve mostly to heighten public fears but ultimately do little to stop hate crimes. Watchfulness and adherence to rule of law is really the only way to keep hate-based crimes to a minimum. One only has to look around the world to see far worse situations.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


What Speech Laws Say
Edward J. Eberle is a professor at the Roger Williams University School of Law and author of “Dignity and Liberty: Constitutional Visions in Germany and the United States.”

The United States is perhaps the only country in the world that allows for protection of hate speech. Much of this has to do with the idea that a free exchange of ideas is important and that allowing speech — even hate-filled speech — can be a safety valve that helps prevent outbreaks of violence.

Under this view, speech needs to be regulated only when it will present a clear and present danger, as when it is a direct incitement to violence. The only exception to this is obscenity, which is unprotected speech even when there is no concrete demonstration of harm.

More restrictive speech laws in other nations reflect different values placed on dignity and personal reputation.

By contrast, most other countries of the world consider hate speech to be an unprotected category of speech. This is the case in all the European countries, like Germany, France, Britain, etc., and also Canada.

That view reflects the different values those legal systems place on factors like the norm of human dignity and personal reputation as well as the experience of the Holocaust. In the U.S., we follow an individualist model of a right to self-determination and expression. For the Europeans and others, there is also a right to speak your mind, but there are some bounds based on respect of others.

One of the leading cases in Germany is the “Holocaust Denial Case” (1990) where the Constitutional Court upheld the denial of a group’s right to protest that Germans had never persecuted Jews or committed the Holocaust. The court stated that this was hate speech, a denigration of a group based on ethnicity and race. In a different case, “Denial of Responsibility for World War II” (1994), the court found that a book observing that Germany was not responsible for World War II was protected speech, as this was a work of research and history and was not defamatory. In a major Canadian case, the constitutional court there ruled that a high school teacher could be censured and fired for using hate speech in the classroom.

Yet most European countries find obscenity to be protected speech unless it demeans women, harms youth or incites violence. As with most things, there are underlying social norms that guide the complexion of the law.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Mental Health Factor
Eugene O’Donnell is a lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He was a former officer in the New York Police Department, a prosecutor with the district attorney offices in Brooklyn and Queens, and a police academy instructor.

It is impossible to ignore the mental health dimension in the Holocaust Museum attack and an earlier assault at the Federal Reserve headquarters by James von Brunn. There may also be serious mental health issues with Scott Roeder, the killer of Dr. Tiller.

Extended post-release mental health supervision should be explored — in some cases, for the whole life of the ex-convict.

There is a gaping hole in our mental health infrastructure which will not be easy to fill, but needs urgent examination and action. Far too many potentially dangerous people are left to fend for themselves. Even when there are concerned family members or friends in their lives, these guardians are often worn out from trying to help, or do not know where to get dependable care.

We continue to leap at the chance to declare actions criminal despite the fact that attacks like this museum shooting are rooted in an extremely irrational and bizarre world view, and are thus outside the scope of traditional criminal notions of “punishment” and “correction.” And of course, even where the criminal justice system is utilized, extended post-release mental health supervision needs to explored, in some cases for the whole life of the ex-convict.

This is not to trivialize the danger of domestic hate groups which certainly exist and need to be ceaselessly monitored. But local police departments have mostly extricated themselves from the business of spying on individuals suspected of political extremism. This is because many departments were accused of abuses in conducting surveillance on, for example, members of the Communist Party and individuals tied to black nationalist activities. In some places, including New York City, police departments cannot even be present at or record rallies conducted by persons espousing hateful objectives.

As always, protecting the rights of an individual, while safeguarding society as a whole, presents an exquisite challenge, with the dangers of stifling individual expression balanced against the wider harm than can occur if we do not get that balance right.

Holocaust Museum Gunman a Longtime Foe of Government

June 11, 2009
By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/us/11shoot.html?scp=2&sq=holocaust%20museum%20shooting&st=cse

WASHINGTON — An 88-year-old white supremacist with a rifle walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the capital’s most visited sites, on Wednesday afternoon and began shooting, fatally wounding a security guard and sending tourists scrambling before he himself was shot, the authorities said.

The gunman was identified by law enforcement officials as James W. von Brunn, who embraces various conspiracy theories involving Jews, blacks and other minority groups and at one point waged a personal war with the federal government.

The gunman and the security guard were both taken to nearby George Washington University Hospital, with Mr. von Brunn handcuffed to a gurney, witnesses said. The guard, Stephen T. Johns, died a short time later. Museum officials said he had worked there for six years; The Associated Press reported his age as 39.

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty said Mr. von Brunn was in critical condition. Chief Cathy L. Lanier of the Washington police said the gunman walked into the museum’s main entrance shortly before 1 p.m. and began shooting without warning. At least one security guard was returning fire; a total of five or six shots are believed to have been fired.

Officials and others who track conspiracy theorists have long been familiar with Mr. von Brunn, whose latest address is believed to be in Eastern Maryland, in part because he maintains a Web site. (Wednesday night, only an archived version of the site was available.) He has claimed variously to be a member of Mensa, the high-I.Q. society; to have played varsity football at a Midwestern college, where he earned a degree in journalism; to have been a PT boat commander in World War II; and to be a painter and an author.

Mr. von Brunn has also claimed to have been victimized by a court system run by Jews and blacks.

Before Wednesday, he was best known to law enforcement officials for having walked into the Washington headquarters of the Federal Reserve System on Dec. 7, 1981, with a bag slung over the shoulder of his trench coat. A guard chased him to the second floor, where the Fed’s board was meeting, and found a revolver, a hunting knife and a sawed-off shotgun in the bag.

Mr. von Brunn, who lived in Lebanon, N.H., at the time, told the police he wanted to take board members hostage to focus news media attention on their responsibility for high interest rates and the nation’s economic difficulties. He was convicted in 1983 and served several years in prison on attempted kidnapping, burglary, assault and weapons charges.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization based in Alabama, said Wednesday that Mr. von Brunn is a racist and anti-Semite with “a long history of associations with prominent neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.”

Rabbis Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Abraham Cooper, an associate dean, said in a statement that the attack at the museum showed “that the cancer of hatred, bigotry and anti-Semitism is alive and well in America.”

“It is deeply disturbing that one of America’s most powerful symbols of the memory of the Holocaust was selected as the site of the attack just days after President Obama accompanied Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel to the Buchenwald death camp,” they said.

Opened in 1993, the museum is situated near the Mall and the Potomac River. Since its dedication, it has had nearly 30 million visitors, including more than 8 million schoolchildren and 85 heads of state, the museum says on its Web site.

Like all public buildings in the capital, the museum has heavy security, with visitors required to pass through metal detectors. But someone determined to enter a building with a firearm can sometimes do so. In July 1998, a gunman killed two police officers and wounded a tourist in the Capitol.

Museum officials issued a statement expressing shock and grief over Wednesday’s attack and said the museum would be closed Thursday in honor of Mr. Johns.

On Wednesday evening, President Obama issued a statement saying, in part, “This outrageous act reminds us that we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms.”

Brian Knowlton and Theo Emery contributed reporting.

Text: Obama’s Speech in Cairo

June 4, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=obama%20cairo&st=cse
The following is a text of President Obama's prepared remarks to the Muslim world, delivered on June 4, 2009, as released by the White House.

I am honored to be in the timeless city of Cairo, and to be hosted by two remarkable institutions. For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning, and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt's advancement. Together, you represent the harmony between tradition and progress. I am grateful for your hospitality, and the hospitality of the people of Egypt. I am also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum.

We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the world – tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate. The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of co-existence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.

Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims. The attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights. This has bred more fear and mistrust.

So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, and who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity. This cycle of suspicion and discord must end.

I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

I do so recognizing that change cannot happen overnight. No single speech can eradicate years of mistrust, nor can I answer in the time that I have all the complex questions that brought us to this point. But I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly the things we hold in our hearts, and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground. As the Holy Koran tells us, "Be conscious of God and speak always the truth." That is what I will try to do – to speak the truth as best I can, humbled by the task before us, and firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart.

Part of this conviction is rooted in my own experience. I am a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk. As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith.

As a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam. It was Islam – at places like Al-Azhar University – that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.

I know, too, that Islam has always been a part of America's story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President John Adams wrote, "The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims." And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States. They have fought in our wars, served in government, stood for civil rights, started businesses, taught at our Universities, excelled in our sports arenas, won Nobel Prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic Torch. And when the first Muslim-American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers – Thomas Jefferson – kept in his personal library.

So I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed. That experience guides my conviction that partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn't. And I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.

But that same principle must apply to Muslim perceptions of America. Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal, and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words – within our borders, and around the world. We are shaped by every culture, drawn from every end of the Earth, and dedicated to a simple concept: E pluribus unum: "Out of many, one."

Much has been made of the fact that an African-American with the name Barack Hussein Obama could be elected President. But my personal story is not so unique. The dream of opportunity for all people has not come true for everyone in America, but its promise exists for all who come to our shores – that includes nearly seven million American Muslims in our country today who enjoy incomes and education that are higher than average.

Moreover, freedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one's religion. That is why there is a mosque in every state of our union, and over 1,200 mosques within our borders. That is why the U.S. government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it.

So let there be no doubt: Islam is a part of America. And I believe that America holds within her the truth that regardless of race, religion, or station in life, all of us share common aspirations – to live in peace and security; to get an education and to work with dignity; to love our families, our communities, and our God. These things we share. This is the hope of all humanity.

Of course, recognizing our common humanity is only the beginning of our task. Words alone cannot meet the needs of our people. These needs will be met only if we act boldly in the years ahead; and if we understand that the challenges we face are shared, and our failure to meet them will hurt us all.

For we have learned from recent experience that when a financial system weakens in one country, prosperity is hurt everywhere. When a new flu infects one human being, all are at risk. When one nation pursues a nuclear weapon, the risk of nuclear attack rises for all nations. When violent extremists operate in one stretch of mountains, people are endangered across an ocean. And when innocents in Bosnia and Darfur are slaughtered, that is a stain on our collective conscience. That is what it means to share this world in the 21st century. That is the responsibility we have to one another as human beings.

This is a difficult responsibility to embrace. For human history has often been a record of nations and tribes subjugating one another to serve their own interests. Yet in this new age, such attitudes are self-defeating. Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. So whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners of it. Our problems must be dealt with through partnership; progress must be shared.

That does not mean we should ignore sources of tension. Indeed, it suggests the opposite: we must face these tensions squarely. And so in that spirit, let me speak as clearly and plainly as I can about some specific issues that I believe we must finally confront together.

The first issue that we have to confront is violent extremism in all of its forms.

In Ankara, I made clear that America is not – and never will be – at war with Islam. We will, however, relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security. Because we reject the same thing that people of all faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children. And it is my first duty as President to protect the American people.

The situation in Afghanistan demonstrates America's goals, and our need to work together. Over seven years ago, the United States pursued al Qaeda and the Taliban with broad international support. We did not go by choice, we went because of necessity. I am aware that some question or justify the events of 9/11. But let us be clear: al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on that day. The victims were innocent men, women and children from America and many other nations who had done nothing to harm anybody. And yet Al Qaeda chose to ruthlessly murder these people, claimed credit for the attack, and even now states their determination to kill on a massive scale. They have affiliates in many countries and are trying to expand their reach. These are not opinions to be debated; these are facts to be dealt with.

Make no mistake: we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We seek no military bases there. It is agonizing for America to lose our young men and women. It is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict. We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can. But that is not yet the case.

That's why we're partnering with a coalition of forty-six countries. And despite the costs involved, America's commitment will not weaken. Indeed, none of us should tolerate these extremists. They have killed in many countries. They have killed people of different faiths – more than any other, they have killed Muslims. Their actions are irreconcilable with the rights of human beings, the progress of nations, and with Islam. The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind. The enduring faith of over a billion people is so much bigger than the narrow hatred of a few. Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism – it is an important part of promoting peace.

We also know that military power alone is not going to solve the problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That is why we plan to invest $1.5 billion each year over the next five years to partner with Pakistanis to build schools and hospitals, roads and businesses, and hundreds of millions to help those who have been displaced. And that is why we are providing more than $2.8 billion to help Afghans develop their economy and deliver services that people depend upon.

Let me also address the issue of Iraq. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world. Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible. Indeed, we can recall the words of Thomas Jefferson, who said: "I hope that our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be."

Today, America has a dual responsibility: to help Iraq forge a better future – and to leave Iraq to Iraqis. I have made it clear to the Iraqi people that we pursue no bases, and no claim on their territory or resources. Iraq's sovereignty is its own. That is why I ordered the removal of our combat brigades by next August. That is why we will honor our agreement with Iraq's democratically-elected government to remove combat troops from Iraqi cities by July, and to remove all our troops from Iraq by 2012. We will help Iraq train its Security Forces and develop its economy. But we will support a secure and united Iraq as a partner, and never as a patron.

And finally, just as America can never tolerate violence by extremists, we must never alter our principles. 9/11 was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our ideals. We are taking concrete actions to change course. I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year.

So America will defend itself respectful of the sovereignty of nations and the rule of law. And we will do so in partnership with Muslim communities which are also threatened. The sooner the extremists are isolated and unwelcome in Muslim communities, the sooner we will all be safer.

The second major source of tension that we need to discuss is the situation between Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab world.

America's strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel's founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.

That is in Israel's interest, Palestine's interest, America's interest, and the world's interest. That is why I intend to personally pursue this outcome with all the patience that the task requires. The obligations that the parties have agreed to under the Road Map are clear. For peace to come, it is time for them – and all of us – to live up to our responsibilities.

Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It's a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.

Now is the time for Palestinians to focus on what they can build. The Palestinian Authority must develop its capacity to govern, with institutions that serve the needs of its people. Hamas does have support among some Palestinians, but they also have responsibilities. To play a role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, and to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel's right to exist.

At the same time, Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.

Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society. And just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel's security; neither does the continuing lack of opportunity in the West Bank. Progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be part of a road to peace, and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress.

Finally, the Arab States must recognize that the Arab Peace Initiative was an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities. The Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems. Instead, it must be a cause for action to help the Palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state; to recognize Israel's legitimacy; and to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past.

America will align our policies with those who pursue peace, and say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs. We cannot impose peace. But privately, many Muslims recognize that Israel will not go away. Likewise, many Israelis recognize the need for a Palestinian state. It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true.

Too many tears have flowed. Too much blood has been shed. All of us have a responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of Israelis and Palestinians can see their children grow up without fear; when the Holy Land of three great faiths is the place of peace that God intended it to be; when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.

The third source of tension is our shared interest in the rights and responsibilities of nations on nuclear weapons.

This issue has been a source of tension between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. For many years, Iran has defined itself in part by its opposition to my country, and there is indeed a tumultuous history between us. In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians. This history is well known. Rather than remain trapped in the past, I have made it clear to Iran's leaders and people that my country is prepared to move forward. The question, now, is not what Iran is against, but rather what future it wants to build.

It will be hard to overcome decades of mistrust, but we will proceed with courage, rectitude and resolve. There will be many issues to discuss between our two countries, and we are willing to move forward without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect. But it is clear to all concerned that when it comes to nuclear weapons, we have reached a decisive point. This is not simply about America's interests. It is about preventing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East that could lead this region and the world down a hugely dangerous path.

I understand those who protest that some countries have weapons that others do not. No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons. That is why I strongly reaffirmed America's commitment to seek a world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons. And any nation – including Iran – should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That commitment is at the core of the Treaty, and it must be kept for all who fully abide by it. And I am hopeful that all countries in the region can share in this goal.

The fourth issue that I will address is democracy.

I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.

That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people. Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.

There is no straight line to realize this promise. But this much is clear: governments that protect these rights are ultimately more stable, successful and secure. Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments – provided they govern with respect for all their people.

This last point is important because there are some who advocate for democracy only when they are out of power; once in power, they are ruthless in suppressing the rights of others. No matter where it takes hold, government of the people and by the people sets a single standard for all who hold power: you must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party. Without these ingredients, elections alone do not make true democracy.

The fifth issue that we must address together is religious freedom.

Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition. I saw it firsthand as a child in Indonesia, where devout Christians worshiped freely in an overwhelmingly Muslim country. That is the spirit we need today. People in every country should be free to choose and live their faith based upon the persuasion of the mind, heart, and soul. This tolerance is essential for religion to thrive, but it is being challenged in many different ways.

Among some Muslims, there is a disturbing tendency to measure one's own faith by the rejection of another's. The richness of religious diversity must be upheld – whether it is for Maronites in Lebanon or the Copts in Egypt. And fault lines must be closed among Muslims as well, as the divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence, particularly in Iraq.

Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together. We must always examine the ways in which we protect it. For instance, in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation. That is why I am committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat.

Likewise, it is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit – for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear. We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism.

Indeed, faith should bring us together. That is why we are forging service projects in America that bring together Christians, Muslims, and Jews. That is why we welcome efforts like Saudi Arabian King Abdullah's Interfaith dialogue and Turkey's leadership in the Alliance of Civilizations. Around the world, we can turn dialogue into Interfaith service, so bridges between peoples lead to action – whether it is combating malaria in Africa, or providing relief after a natural disaster.

The sixth issue that I want to address is women's rights.

I know there is debate about this issue. I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality. And it is no coincidence that countries where women are well-educated are far more likely to be prosperous.

Now let me be clear: issues of women's equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam. In Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia, we have seen Muslim-majority countries elect a woman to lead. Meanwhile, the struggle for women's equality continues in many aspects of American life, and in countries around the world.

Our daughters can contribute just as much to society as our sons, and our common prosperity will be advanced by allowing all humanity – men and women – to reach their full potential. I do not believe that women must make the same choices as men in order to be equal, and I respect those women who choose to live their lives in traditional roles. But it should be their choice. That is why the United States will partner with any Muslim-majority country to support expanded literacy for girls, and to help young women pursue employment through micro-financing that helps people live their dreams.

Finally, I want to discuss economic development and opportunity.

I know that for many, the face of globalization is contradictory. The Internet and television can bring knowledge and information, but also offensive sexuality and mindless violence. Trade can bring new wealth and opportunities, but also huge disruptions and changing communities. In all nations – including my own – this change can bring fear. Fear that because of modernity we will lose of control over our economic choices, our politics, and most importantly our identities – those things we most cherish about our communities, our families, our traditions, and our faith.

But I also know that human progress cannot be denied. There need not be contradiction between development and tradition. Countries like Japan and South Korea grew their economies while maintaining distinct cultures. The same is true for the astonishing progress within Muslim-majority countries from Kuala Lumpur to Dubai. In ancient times and in our times, Muslim communities have been at the forefront of innovation and education.

This is important because no development strategy can be based only upon what comes out of the ground, nor can it be sustained while young people are out of work. Many Gulf States have enjoyed great wealth as a consequence of oil, and some are beginning to focus it on broader development. But all of us must recognize that education and innovation will be the currency of the 21st century, and in too many Muslim communities there remains underinvestment in these areas. I am emphasizing such investments within my country. And while America in the past has focused on oil and gas in this part of the world, we now seek a broader engagement.

On education, we will expand exchange programs, and increase scholarships, like the one that brought my father to America, while encouraging more Americans to study in Muslim communities. And we will match promising Muslim students with internships in America; invest in on-line learning for teachers and children around the world; and create a new online network, so a teenager in Kansas can communicate instantly with a teenager in Cairo.

On economic development, we will create a new corps of business volunteers to partner with counterparts in Muslim-majority countries. And I will host a Summit on Entrepreneurship this year to identify how we can deepen ties between business leaders, foundations and social entrepreneurs in the United States and Muslim communities around the world.

On science and technology, we will launch a new fund to support technological development in Muslim-majority countries, and to help transfer ideas to the marketplace so they can create jobs. We will open centers of scientific excellence in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and appoint new Science Envoys to collaborate on programs that develop new sources of energy, create green jobs, digitize records, clean water, and grow new crops. And today I am announcing a new global effort with the Organization of the Islamic Conference to eradicate polio. And we will also expand partnerships with Muslim communities to promote child and maternal health.

All these things must be done in partnership. Americans are ready to join with citizens and governments; community organizations, religious leaders, and businesses in Muslim communities around the world to help our people pursue a better life.

The issues that I have described will not be easy to address. But we have a responsibility to join together on behalf of the world we seek – a world where extremists no longer threaten our people, and American troops have come home; a world where Israelis and Palestinians are each secure in a state of their own, and nuclear energy is used for peaceful purposes; a world where governments serve their citizens, and the rights of all God's children are respected. Those are mutual interests. That is the world we seek. But we can only achieve it together.

I know there are many – Muslim and non-Muslim – who question whether we can forge this new beginning. Some are eager to stoke the flames of division, and to stand in the way of progress. Some suggest that it isn't worth the effort – that we are fated to disagree, and civilizations are doomed to clash. Many more are simply skeptical that real change can occur. There is so much fear, so much mistrust. But if we choose to be bound by the past, we will never move forward. And I want to particularly say this to young people of every faith, in every country – you, more than anyone, have the ability to remake this world.

All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort – a sustained effort – to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the dignity of all human beings.

It is easier to start wars than to end them. It is easier to blame others than to look inward; to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share. But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path. There is also one rule that lies at the heart of every religion – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This truth transcends nations and peoples – a belief that isn't new; that isn't black or white or brown; that isn't Christian, or Muslim or Jew. It's a belief that pulsed in the cradle of civilization, and that still beats in the heart of billions. It's a faith in other people, and it's what brought me here today.

We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning, keeping in mind what has been written.

The Holy Koran tells us, "O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another."

The Talmud tells us: "The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace."

The Holy Bible tells us, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God."

The people of the world can live together in peace. We know that is God's vision. Now, that must be our work here on Earth. Thank you. And may God's peace be upon you.

At Nazi Camp, Obama Calls Holocaust Denial ‘Hateful’

June 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/06/world/europe/06prexy.html?hp
By NICHOLAS KULISH, JEFF ZELENY AND ALAN COWELL

WEIMAR, Germany —President Obama traveled to the former concentration camp of Buchenwald Friday, laid a single white rose at a memorial to the dead and, returning emotionally to a theme he addressed in a major speech in Cairo on Thursday, criticized those who denied the Holocaust.

“To this day there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened, a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful,” the President said, echoing his words in Cairo in an address that reached for what he called a “new beginning” in the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world.

By visiting Buchenwald on Friday, he also underscored what he termed in Cairo America’s “unbreakable” bond with Israel. Mr. Obama has been pushing hard during this trip for a two-state solution in the Middle East, and the administration has angered some in Israel by taking a tough stand against Israel’s expanding existing settlements.

In his visit to the former concentration camp, Mr. Obama said the site was the “ultimate rebuke” to those who deny or seek to minimize the Holocaust.

“These sights have not lost their horror with the passage of time.”

“More than half a century later, our grief and our outrage over what happened have not diminished. I will not forget what I have seen here today.”

The camp where 56,000 people died also bears a particular significance for Germans, embodying the contradiction of a civilized society’s descent into organized barbarism. The camp sits just a few miles outside the city of Weimar, one of the country’s leading cultural centers and home to the great German writers Goethe and Schiller.

With his hands behind his back and a thoughtful expression on his face, Mr. Obama walked through the former concentration camp, flanked by Chancellor Angela Merkel and Elie Wiesel, a Nobel peace prize winner, writer and Holocaust survivor, who survived a death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald and was at the camp when it was liberated in April 1945.

Mr. Wiesel spoke movingly about the death of his father a few months before the liberation of the camp, calling the visit “a way of coming and visit my father’s grave. But he had no grave. His grave is somewhere in the sky, which has become in those years the largest cemetery of the Jewish people.”

Mr. Obama claims a personal connection to the concentration camp. His great-uncle, Charles Payne, helped liberate a sub-camp of Buchenwald called Ohrdruf.

Mrs. Merkel, who like Mr. Wiesel and Mr. Obama laid a long-stemmed white rose in memory of the dead, spoke of the German responsibility “to do everything possible that something like that never happens again.”

She added, “I bow before all the victims.”

Earlier the two leaders met for talks in Dresden, where President Obama declared that “the moment is now” to press for a Middle East settlement. He put Israelis and Palestinians on notice that it was up to them to make “difficult compromises.”

President Obama said he was dispatching his top Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, to the region next week to follow up on issues raised during the Cairo speech. Time was of the essence, he said, for Israelis and the Palestinians to step up their efforts.

“The moment is now for us to act on what we all know to be the truth, which is that each side is going to have to make some difficult compromises,” Mr. Obama said. “We have to reject violence. The Palestinians have to get serious about creating a security environment that is required for Israel to feel confident. Israelis are going to have to take some difficult steps.”

“Ultimately, the United States can’t force peace upon the parties,” he added, “but what we’ve tried to do is to clear away some of the misunderstandings so we can at least begin to have frank dialogue.”

On other issues, the two leaders said they would work closely on trying to persuade Iran to abandon what the West fears is a nuclear program to build an atomic bomb but which Tehran says is for civilian purposes.

But there was no indication of major progress on Washington’s desire for Europeans to accept prisoners from Guantánamo Bay as Mr. Obama moves to redeem a pledge to close the detention center in Cuba.

“I don’t anticipate it’s going to be resolved in the next two or three months,” Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Obama’s one-day visit to Germany is laden with symbolism. Dresden, in the former East Germany, is for many Germans, a symbol of the suffering of civilians. Germans perished in large numbers when the British and American air forces fire-bombed the city in February 1945, only months before the end of World War II. Military experts still debate whether the onslaught was necessary with the German Army already in retreat.

The bombing destroyed the baroque Frauenkirche, or Church of Our Lady, which the president visited Friday. The church was not rebuilt until after the fall of Communism. Some $218 million, more than half of it private donations, was spent on reconstructing it, and the new church was consecrated in 2005.

Mrs. Merkel suggested Friday that the city symbolized the progress Germany has made since the collapse of the former East Germany.

The meeting between her and Mr. Obama renewed speculation about how friendly they really were beyond the diplomatic smiles and handshakes.

But Mr. Obama dismissed the suggestion that his relationship with Chancellor Merkel was strained. Asked by a German television reporter about it, he playfully admonished the press.

“Stop it, all of you,” Mr. Obama said. “We have more than enough problems out there without manufacturing problems.”

He smiled and looked over to his German counterpart, saying: “It is a great pleasure to be with my friend once again, who I always seek out for intelligent analysis and straight talk.”

Indeed, Mr. Obama said on Friday: “Germany is a close friend and a critical partner to the United States, and I believe that friendship is going to be essential not only for our two countries but for the world if we are to make progress on some of the critical issues that we face, whether it’s national security issues or economic issues or issues that affect the globe like climate change.”

Specifically, he alluded to the global financial crisis, which created major differences between the United States and Germany. Mr. Obama said it was “going to be very important to coordinate between Europe and the United States as we move to strengthen our financial regulatory systems.”

“We affirmed that we are not going to engage in protectionism. And, as all of us do, we have to make sure we keep our borders open and that companies can move back and forth between the United States and Europe in providing goods and services to our respective countries.”

Nicholas Kulish reported from Weimar, Germany; Jeff Zeleny Dresden ; and Alan Cowell from Paris.