I had new article I wanted to link to but unfortunately the link was broken really fast. I'll reprint the whole article here. The article points up the curious alliance between groups of the Left and fundamentalist Islamic groups. Only one of the leftist groups the Labor Struggle Movement supported passing a law banning the hijab or Islamic headscarf from schools. All the other major groups on the Left opposed the law because of its restrictions on personal expression. The Left is officially atheist; they seem to be overlooking this and allying themselves with the fundamentalists because of a shared opposition to capitalism. But I think this alliance is worrisome, because the Islamic fundamentalists do not have the same notion of human rights s the West does. There is also a call for "positive discrimination" or basically the same as Affirmative Action in the U.S. in order to integrate Muslims more fully into French life.

Here's the whole piece that was from the Islamonline.net website:

French Leftist Groups Oppose Ban On Hijab In Schools


We should talk about the several difficulties that confront French Muslims to help them improve their way of living and positions,” Sarkozy

By Hadi Yahmed, IOL Paris Correspondent

PARIS, October 9 (IslamOnline.net) - The possibility of passing a law that bans hijab in schools in France has recently raised the opposition of the majority of French leftist groups as French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said there is no need to pass a law that bans religious symbols in schools.

Labor Struggle Movement is the only leftist organization that supported passing such a law, not due to its interpretation of secularism but to the fact that it sees the hijab as a symbol of women’s weakness.

Meanwhile, other leftist groups, including Revolutionary Communist League, opposed such a law, pointing out that it would deprive a large number of veiled young women from their right of education.

To express their opposition, several French leftist societies have organized a gathering on Tuesday, October 7, in front of the Henri Wallon lycee in the Paris northern suburb of Aubervilliers, during which they called for the return of French sisters, Lila and Alma Levy, to the institute.

Lila and Alma, 18 and 16, were expelled after the school claimed they were wearing clothes "of an ostentatious character".

The administration of the institute had previously decided to prevent both sisters from entering the institute starting Wednesday, September 24, due to their insistence to wear hijab.

Their father, Laurent Levy, a lawyer of a Jewish origin, said that Preventing his daughters from entering the institute is anti-secular, adding that those who describe themselves as secularists are ignorant of secular laws.

'School For All'

The gathering of leftist groups represented in the Revolutionary Communist League, Women and Public Opinion and the Immigration and Neighborhoods Organization in front of the institute comes one day before the disciplinary council due to be held on October 10 to settle the issue of both sisters.

Leftist groups distributed a communiqué saying, “they do not support the Islamic veil in itself but they support the principle that French schools are for all; and hence they oppose the idea of depriving both Lila and Alma from their right to go to school.”

Dozens of demonstrators carried banners that call for “schools for all people” of whatever religious affiliation.

In the same context, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy opposed passing a law that bans veils in schools.

“There is no need to pass a law that bans religious symbols in France,” Sarkozy said before the Commission of Bernar Stasse that is assigned with applying secular principles in France and preparing recommendations on the possibility of passing a law that bans veils in schools.

The minister told the committee that a tougher law that would bar women and girls from wearing traditional Muslim headscarves when they attend school or work in a state office was “neither necessary nor useful nor opportune.”

The current law, which dates back to 1905, already rules out the wearing of religious symbols in public offices and schools, he said, and a tougher new one would only isolate Muslims and encourage them to take a more radical stand.

“We should talk about the several difficulties that confront French Muslims to help them improve their way of living and positions,” Sarkozy said, pointing out that French Muslims are away from high-ranking jobs of the state.

'Second Class Citizen'

France’s five million Muslims do not enjoy the same rights as the country’s other citizens and might need positive discrimination efforts to reach an equal footing, Sarkozy said according to Arab News website.

French Muslims, mostly of North African Arab origin, face prejudice at work and a shortage of mosques and other religious services in comparison to other religions, he told the official committee.

“If you’re named Mohammed, your resume isn’t the last to be thrown into the waste basket,” he remarked, adding there were almost no Muslims in any senior positions in France.

“It’s a fact that our compatriots of the Muslim faith do not have the same rights as believers in the other great religions.”

Sarkozy, who last year helped Muslim organizations found a national council to represent their interests, broke a French taboo by suggesting that positive discrimination might help integrate Muslims more fully into French life.

“The term ‘positive discrimination’ doesn’t scare me,” he said, arguing that favoring Muslims might be the only way to create role models for the community. France has traditionally shunned anything that smacks of ethnic profiling.

Sarkozy said Muslims did not have enough mosques, places in public cemeteries and chaplains in schools, often because officials from the mostly Catholic majority in this country of 60 million used the law to discriminate against them, the website added.

Noting that many towns refused building permits for mosques on technical grounds, he remarked: “We’ve spent more energy using zoning laws to block the building of mosques than we have to protect our seashores.”

Muslims also had no schools in France to train imams, or prayer leaders, forcing congregations to recruit men abroad who often speak no French and sometimes preach extremism.

Sarkozy also criticized French intellectuals who single out Islam for discriminating against women, saying this was a problem in all religions. “I don’t see a lot of women in the Catholic Bishops’ Conference in France,” he observed.


- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 1:44 PM

 
Here's an interesting development: Canada will start enforcing the decisions of an arbitration board that is based on the Islamic Sharia legal code. That's the one the mandates flogging, stoning and beheading for serious crimes like, theft, adultery and murder. Because of recent changes to Canada's Arbitration Act, Muslims now feel they can set up the arbitration board. Bringing cases before the board will be strictly voluntary but the decisions of the board must be enforced by the courts, which will have no discretion. I'm guessing most likely the board will be used for business disputes and minor personal disagreements. But if the board does hand down a serious penalty involving mutilation or death it will be interesting to see how Canadian authorities deal with it.
- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 5:24 PM

 
Here's a piece about the burgeoning anti-Semitism in France. The ebb and flow of anti-Semitism has proceeded since the French revolution and has been promoted by both the Left and Right, depending on their particular enthusiams. In the 1930's and 40's (under Vichy), it was from the Right in the form of support for fascism and Naziism. More recently it has emanated from the Left in the form of anti-Zionism. This new anti-Semitism has emerged among elite opinion in spite of the holidays and memorials to the Holocaust. While the government and leaders of other faiths have tended to play down the issue, Jews have reacted well, trying to get the government and media to pay more attention.

A major component of all this is the rapidly increasing Muslim population. They now represent at least 10% of France's population and are ten times as numerous as Jews. They have their own neighborhoods, institutions and press, setting them apart from the rest of France. Many come from countries where anti-Semitism and support for the Palestinian cause is endemic. While the birthrate for ethnic French continues to decline the birth rate for Muslims is increasing. The piece ends with a list of remedies, mostly involving having the government and the European Union strongly condemn and counteract anti-Semitism. Here's the money quote:

"French Muslims thus live in a cultural enclave and are well-equipped to dismiss those parts of the dominant French culture that do not fit their own culture. This is especially true of the politically correct rejection of radical anti-Semitism. "

"The more numerous, powerful and influential the Muslims are becoming in France, the more devastating is the impact of their particular culture on the global French culture. Muslim imperviousness to the politically correct rejection of radical anti-Semitism is helping non-Muslim radical anti-Semites to voice their views more confidently."

"As a rule, the more committed to Islam and Arab culture they are, the more anti-Semitic French Muslims tend to be. Conversely, the less committed they are, the more likely they are to reject anti-Semitism. This translates into ethnic lines. French Muslims of Arab descent are usually religious Muslims and unreconstructed anti-Semites. French Muslims of Berber descent (especially the Kabyle community) are usually more secular and more prepared to reject radical anti-Semitism and engage in good relations with Jews. Militant Berbers or Kabyles tend to be frankly friendly with Jews and to entertain positive views about Israel. "


- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 8:50 PM

 
Here's another scary report about the recent increase in chatter on terrorist websites leading Homeland Security to issue a travel advisory for Americans. It also turns out that although the threat level is being held publicly at yellow (for "elevated") behind the scenes law enforcement personnel are operating as if the threat level has been raised to its highest level, red (for "severe") meaning a definite, imminent threat of terrorism. The biggest threat seems to be form the type of car-bombings found in the Middle East (most recently Turkey) to coincide with the end of the Islamic month of Ramadan and the Thanksgiving day weekend. Here's the money quote:

"The government is closed on Thursday, Nov. 27, for Thanksgiving."

"But millions of Americans will be traveling throughout the holiday week, and Homeland Security warns in its memo that "we cannot discount multiple attacks involving the use of general-aviation aircraft."

"The department's current terror threat level stands at yellow, or elevated, indicating there is only a significant risk of terrorist attacks. Publicly, it has recommended Americans continue with plans for work or leisure."

"Behind the scenes, however, it has directed federal and state law enforcement, as well as security personnel, to initiate protective measures under its highest threat level – red – a condition when there is an imminent risk of terrorist attacks."

"For instance, "Measure R.2" of the department's internal Threat Level Red recommendations advises government agencies to, among other things: "Identify the owners of all vehicles already parked at state facilities. In those cases where the owner or presence of a vehicle cannot be explained (owner is not present and has no obvious agency affiliation), inspect the vehicle for dangerous items and take steps to remove the vehicle from the vicinity."

"Homeland Security officials insist they have no specific threat. Indeed, the department memo states: "We have no tactical information identifying timing, targets, tactics or locations for these operations."

"However, it goes on to say that "recent information" and attacks reflect "al-Qaida's desire to repeat a mass casualty attack and/or strike major political and symbolic and economic targets" in America."

- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 8:20 PM

 
Here's a look back at the legacy of JFK by the British journalist Christopher Hitchens who is man of the Left but has nonetheless been supportive of the war on terror. He says in the article he's not unhappy the cult of JFK seems to be fading. I have to confess I've always been bothered by the JFK cult more than anything else because when considering JFK so many people in the media seem to lose the critical distance necessary to evaluate a subject. Hitchens points out some things about his performance as president that might detract from what he calls JFK's "aura". However much JFK may have meant to many people, facts and evidence and ultimately truth are important too, which is independent of anyone's feelings. Here's the money quote:

"In a recent ill-phrased speech, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts referred with contempt to the combat in Iraq as something cooked up "in Texas." He thereby gave vent to a facile liberal prejudice that still sees the Galahad of Camelot as having been somehow slain by Dallas itself, or by Texas at any rate. And what do we think of, or what are we supposed to think of, when the word "Texas" is invoked? Why, cowboys and gunplay and irresponsible capitalist dynasties."

"For those reasons (if not for those reasons alone) Sen. Kennedy might have done better to keep a guard on his tongue. The biographers and archivists have done most of the relevant job of reporting and disclosing, and what they have reported and disclosed is a president frantically "high" on pills of all kinds (that's when he was not alarmingly "low" for the same reason), a president quick on the draw and willing to solicit Mafia hit men for his foreign policy, a president willing to risk nuclear war to save his own face; a president who bugged his own Oval Office, a president who used the executive mansion as a bordello, and a president whose name we might never have learned if not for the fanatical determination of his father to purchase him a political career. If a tithe of these things were really true of George W. Bush, Howard Dean might claim he was on to something. As it is, "the mantle of JFK" is a garment that no serious Democrat can apparently afford to discard. The last time it was plucked from the wardrobe of central casting, it made Bill Clinton look--at least to the credulous--like a potential statesman. Which turned out to be about right."

- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 9:50 PM

 
Here's a piece about the porous border with Mexico. Not only do illegal immigrants from Mexico sneak across the border but sometimes they are able to sneak Middle Easterners across the border, too. One area in Arizona is so heavily trafficked by Middle Easterners it's called the "Arab Road". The article is from the aggressively anti-immigrant vdare.com site. While often shrill in its opposition to immigration, this site has raised important issues not only about the possibility of terrorists coming over but also the overwhelming of social service and law enforcement agencies by the relentless tide of immigration.

These days it seems everyone hates the U.S. for their own parochial reasons as columnist Mark Steyn points out in the UK's Telegraph. Here's the money quote:

The fanatical Muslims despise America because it's all lapdancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it's all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it's controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too Godless, America is also too isolationist, except when it's too imperialist. And even its imperialism is too vulgar and arriviste to appeal to real imperialists: let's face it, the ghastly Yanks never stick it to the fuzzy-wuzzy with the dash and élan of the Bengal Lancers, which appears to be the principal complaint of Sir Max Hastings and his ilk. To the mullahs, America is the Great Satan, a wily seducer; to the Gaullists, America is the Great Cretin, a culture so self-evidently moronic that only stump-toothed inbred Appalachian lardbutts could possibly fall for it. American popular culture is utterly worthless, except when one of its proponents - Michael Moore, Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon - attacks Bush, in which case he or she is showered with European awards and sees the foreign-language rights for his latest tract sell for six figures at Frankfurt. The fact that the best-selling anti-Americans are themselves American - Moore, Chomsky - is perhaps the cruellest manifestation of the suffocating grip of the hyperpower.

Too Christian, too Godless, too isolationist, too imperialist, too seductive, too cretinous, America is George Orwell's Room 101: whatever your bugbear, you will find it therein - for the Continentals, excessive religiosity; for the Muslims, excessive decadence; for Harold Pinter, excessively bleeding rectums.

So be it. This is a psychosis so impervious to reason that on Thursday those in the most advanced stage will pour into the streets to re-enact the toppling of Saddam's statue with Bush on the podium. The 40 per cent of Britons who merely think the President "stupid" will cheer from their sofas.


- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 9:09 PM

 
This will become a basic document about the war on terror, an oustanding piece called "Why the antiwar Left must confront terrorism". It's an interview with William Schulz who is the head of Amnesty International USA. He acknowledges the forces of the Left have been dismissive about the terrorism concerns of ordinary citizens. Whatever ones thinks of President Bush or any other official and whatever one thinks of any particular policy the fact remains governments have a duty to protect the safety of their citizens. Thus some security efforts are to be expected. If the Left does not address the public's real concerns about terrorism, it risks becoming irrelevant. Here's the money quote:

"Is the human rights community simply too disorganized to combat terror, or is there a deeper ideological problem?"

"Human rights organizations are basically set up to put pressure on governments, not on more amorphous entities like terrorist groups. The traditional tools we use are generally not going to be effective with terrorists. I doubt Osama Bin Laden is going to be moved by 50,000 members of Amnesty International writing him a letter asking him to refrain from terrorist acts. In the face of a new kind of force in the world that is detrimental to human rights, the human rights community has been slow to adapt to that new reality, in both its understanding and its tactics. There's a cultural lag at work here. "

"It's a serious problem. It means that human rights advocates are seen solely as harping critics. We certainly need to be that; it's a very important role. But if we fail to engage with the very real, hard decisions that governments have to make about protecting the safety of their citizens, then we'll be dismissed as charlatans, or ideologues who are out of step with reality"



- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 9:02 PM

 
2 nights ago the comments area suddenly quit working. I hadn't touched the code. Last night and tonight it seems to be working again (still didn't touch the code!).

I have two more basic documents on the war on terror, these about North Korea. The 1st is an account of a vacation in Pyongyang which is North Korea's capital. The author went on a tour organized by the Koryo Group which, incredibly, runs tours to the last remaining Stalinist state. It's a great read, learn all about the government's attempts to control the thoughts of all of its citizens and control the perception of itself by foreign visitors. The second is a chilling account of the North Korean Gulag which people can be swept up in for the most minor offenses. Sometimes even completely innocent people can be arrested and imprisoned if a close family member is accused of a crime. This is the original link:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/030623/usnews/23gulag.htm

Unfortunately the article is part of U.S. News' archive section which is a subscription service. Because it's so important I've decided to reprint the whole article here:

Gulag Nation
Unseen by the outside world, North Korea runs vast prison camps of unspeakable cruelty

By Thomas Omestad
SEOUL--The guards at North Korea's No. 22 Hoeryong prison camp had a little competition going: catch one of the rare inmates who dare try to escape and win a trip to college. And so one day in 1991, recalls Ahn Myong Chul, a former prison driver who later fled North Korea, an enterprising fellow guard coaxed five prisoners into climbing the camp's barbed-wire fence. He shot them dead--and thereby earned an education at a state political college.

Such is the capriciousness of life in one corner of North Korea's vast gulag, its chain of political prison camps for those who--often by chance--run afoul of the world's most virulently Stalinist regime. Today, at least 200,000 political prisoners are held in six giant camps, according to South Korean and U.S. officials, and the number may be growing as North Korea's leaders tighten their grip on a hungry and desperate population. The camps are nothing short of human black holes, into which purported enemies of the regime disappear and rarely exit. "If they died, even their corpses would be buried there," says Ahn, now a 34-year-old bank worker in Seoul.

In the past three decades, some 400,000 North Koreans are believed to have perished in the gulag. Yet relatively little is known about the camps, which are sealed off from international scrutiny. U.S. News tracked down five former prisoners and guards who managed to defect to South Korea, and they describe a world of routine horror: beatings, crippling torture, hunger, slave-style labor, executions. Fetuses are said to be aborted by salt water injected into women's wombs; if that fails, babies are strangled upon delivery. Guards practice tae kwon do on prisoners, who obediently line up to take their punches and kicks. These are places, says Ahn, where the proverbial salt was actually rubbed into prisoners' wounds.

Inmates are told they are traitors--and no longer human beings. Their grinding, daily routines reinforce the message. After laboring 14 hours a day, exhausted prisoners return at night to dreary, unheated quarters. A few die from illness, hunger, or injuries in a typical week, say survivors. Executions by firing squad or hanging serve as warnings not to resist. Former guard Choi Dong Chul, 36, describes the fate of a family of five political prisoners caught three days after making their escape: The grandmother and the father were hanged; his three boys were shot; their bodies were strung up; and some 15,000 inmates filed by, throwing stones, which tore apart the bodies. "Just make them obey" was the standing order on handling inmates, says Choi, who served at the now defunct No. 11 camp in North Hamgyong province.

The survivors' recollections cannot be verified firsthand, and the North Korean government denies that it even maintains political prisons. But U.S. and South Korean authorities, along with some human-rights experts in both countries, give the accounts considerable credence since they track with what intelligence shows about the North's repressive practices. "It's arguably the worst human-rights situation in the world," asserts Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican.

Life in North Korea's secret gulag is getting some overdue attention, however. In April, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights for the first time condemned Pyongyang for "systemic, widespread and grave" rights violations. A watchdog group, the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, is planning to highlight the abuses in an extensive report this summer, and the U.S. Senate held hearings this month that touched on the gulag. The Bush administration is also focusing on the camps--and uncovering new detail about their surprising scope. Despite North Korea's denials, says a senior State Department official privy to intelligence, "there's lots of proof."

Depraved. Early in the Bush administration, a U.S. spy satellite was assigned to shoot high-resolution pictures from space of one camp in mountainous northeastern North Korea. At first, officials were mystified: Where were the camp's fences? They repeatedly ordered the satellite to expand the frame of its pictures. Finally, a senior administration official tells U.S. News, the perimeter was located, revealing a camp larger in size than the District of Columbia, with clusters of buildings that look like villages. "If you look at a map of North Korea, it would not be just a dot on the map. It's a perceptible portion of the map," says the official. "There's a general lack of understanding of how depraved the human-rights situation in North Korea is," the official says, predicting that "the horrors that will come out" will rival those of Cambodia in the 1970s.

The camps have also grabbed the attention of President Bush--and seem to have buttressed his instinct for a hard-line response to North Korea's nuclear cheating. In an interview with Bob Woodward for his book Bush at War, the president vented an unusually visceral reaction toward North Korea's all-powerful leader. "I loathe Kim Jong Il!" he shouted, leaning forward in his chair. "I have seen intelligence of these prison camps--they're huge--that he uses to break up families, and to torture people." Bush's moral revulsion isn't a passing mood. It has come up as well in private conversation with Brownback. "I think it's why the president is after Kim Jong Il: It's how he [Kim] treats his own people," Brownback tells U.S. News. "It really galls him."

And yet, stories from the North Korean gulag receive surprisingly little attention in South Korea and elsewhere. Investigations by human-rights groups have been hobbled by the relative lack of witnesses and the barriers to corroborating reports of abuses. Of all the people who have been confined in or worked at the camps, only about 10 are known to have escaped the North and told their stories. And human-rights monitors, along with many South Koreans, feel burned by the manipulation of past reports on North Korea by South Korean intelligence.

The South Korean government has also turned the spotlight away from the North Korean gulag. The South's "sunshine policy" of reaching out to the North seeks to avoid confrontation with Kim Jong Il in favor of encouraging Pyongyang to open up to the world. When then South Korean President Kim Dae Jung flew to Pyongyang in 2000 for a groundbreaking summit with Kim Jong Il, the onetime political prisoner and later Nobel Peace Prize winner didn't say a word to the North Korean dictator about human rights. South Korea's new president, former human-rights lawyer Roh Moo Hyun, accepts that logic. The thinking, say aides, is that the North might cancel talks on nuclear and other issues if challenged on its political prisons. "This is not the right time to press upon Kim Jong Il," says Yoo Jay Kun, a legislator who has advised Roh. "The sunshine policy will provide a harvest later on."

That hope doesn't impress many human-rights activists. "The defectors are politically inconvenient," says Tim Peters, the founder of Helping Hands Korea, a Seoul-based group that helps North Korean refugees make their way to the South. "They're not consonant with the sunshine policy," a tenet of which, he argues, is "Don't offend the Kim Jong Il regime." One result is public indifference. Young South Koreans, Peters says, "are woefully ignorant of the gulag in North Korea."

But those who endured the camps are anything but indifferent. They describe a level of savagery that satellite photographs can never convey. Nor does the Orwellian terminology for the camps reveal much. Political prisons are called "management centers." Those centers, in turn, are divided into two categories: "complete control zones," with life imprisonment, and "revolutionizing process zones," from where some inmates, principally family members, might eventually return to society. The prisoners are banally referred to as "resettlers." Other camps, dubbed "re-education" places, lump together common criminals and political prisoners.

The horror of the North Korean gulag is compounded by the trivial offenses that can draw such punishment: listening to foreign radio, accidentally sitting on a newspaper photo of Kim Jong Il, or making a heedlessly candid remark. Most prisoners, recalls Ahn, "made one small mistake." One was arrested after singing a South Korean pop song titled, "Don't Cry for Me, Younger Sister." The unlucky woman, says David Hawk, a researcher for the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, learned the tune from watching a North Korean propaganda film but was nonetheless accused of disturbing the public socialist order. Often, individuals and even whole families are whisked away from their homes in the dead of night and packed off to camps. Says Hawk, a veteran of human-rights probes in Cambodia and Rwanda, "I don't know of a country in the world today that's as repressive as North Korea. I believe it's the worst."

Rule by terror. The camps serve as a frightening, if mysterious, deterrent to anti-Communist activity. North Koreans receive few details about the gulag--but enough is known that parents see fit to warn their children to keep family opinions to themselves. "There were rumors that nobody can get out," says Soon Young Bum, a 46-year-old fishing boat captain from North Korea who brought his family to freedom last August. Adds Benjamin Yoon, a leader of the Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, "We call North Korea a prison state. It's rule by terror."

The camps also generate funds for a cash-strapped regime whose economy has shrunk by about half since 1990. Prisoners mine coal, harvest trees, and manufacture goods for export and domestic consumption--from snake brandy to bicycles. They gather the roots of plants used for traditional medicines, some destined for sale in Japan. The hot pepper sauce from Ahn's camp at Hoeryong sits on the tables at Pyongyang's Koryo Hotel, where westerners stay. Ahn likens the camps to Nazi-run Auschwitz. The survivors agree. "It was," concludes one, Lee Young Kook, "a system to kill us."

As he sits in a smoky Seoul coffee shop and recounts his past, Lee, 40, can hardly believe his good fortune. Lee once worked at the heart of power in Pyongyang, a trusted agent for Kim Jong Il in the years before Kim succeeded his father, Kim Il Sung. The names "Kim Jong Il" and "Kim Il Sung" were carved on Lee's pistol; he considered it "the greatest honor" to serve in Pyongyang's security elite. Lee was isolated from his family, but he enjoyed the rare perks of good food and clothing.

It was not to last. When officials discovered that one of Lee's cousins was a driver for Kim Jong Il, he was dismissed for security reasons because of possible collusion. He returned to his hometown and became an executive in the local branch of the Communist Party. But he was shocked to see people eating grass because of crippling food shortages. He began listening to South Korean radio--a grave offense--and in 1994 decided to defect. Lee made his way into China but was tricked by North Korean agents, who smuggled him back over the border. He says that only an order from Kim Jong Il spared him from death.

Lasting scars. He was sent to the No. 15 prison camp at Yodok. A banner greeted unlucky arrivals: "You shouldn't negotiate with class enemies." Lee, like the other unfortunates, received a ration of 4.5 ounces of corn powder, a few cabbage leaves, and salt. His fellow prisoners included ex-military officers, professors, and others who fell under suspicion after living abroad. They toiled in coal mines, forests, and farm fields. Beatings were routine: Lee rolls up his pants to show the grayish-brown scars on his right leg, reminders of blows from long wooden sticks. He lost most of the sight in his right eye, his teeth were broken, and blood still oozes out of his left ear at times. Of the 1,000 people in his prison unit, he says, about 200 died every year. "It was beyond my imagination. The officers treated prisoners not even like animals but like bugs. They stepped on them," he says.

But Lee was luckier than most. He was released without explanation in 1999--his weight having fallen from 207 to 119 pounds--and returned to his home village. But he became frightened when rumors circulated that he was a South Korean agent, and he decided to flee through China again--this time successfully. Lee now runs an organic food store.

Kang Chul Hwan is also a veteran of the No. 15 camp at Yodok. Now 34, Kang had a comparatively privileged start in life. He lived in a comfortable Pyongyang apartment assigned to his grandparents, pro-regime Communists of Korean descent who had returned from Japan. In grammar school, he considered himself one of Kim Il Sung's "little soldiers," a member of the Pupils' Red Army, marching with fake machine guns. But when his grandfather came under suspicion--for reasons still unknown--Kang, along with his family, was packed off on a truck to Yodok at the age of 9. From then on, he says, "I can't believe what happened to me."

The young Kang was ensnared in a signature feature of North Korea's political prisons: guilt by family association. Kim Il Sung, say human-rights monitors and former prisoners, declared that three generations of a political enemy's family can be jailed--without trial. Political rehabilitation is possible in principle, but apparently few endure the years of harsh treatment. Kang and other camp survivors say that sexual intercourse is forbidden (though some women are forced to have sex with camp guards). Women who become pregnant would swallow poison or take falls in attempts to abort. Otherwise, the fetuses are killed--sometimes by the camp doctors, themselves prisoners. Asserts Kang, "The government's policy was to extinguish all the seeds of all the political prisoners."

Kang says he nearly died of malnutrition. Survival depended on finding food beyond the meager diet of corn and salt, so he and others laid traps for snakes, rats, and bugs--eaten cooked or raw, if need be. Hunger dictated. "I wanted to eat anything," he recounts matter of factly.

Ultimately, though, Kang was also one of the lucky ones. He says he wasn't beaten severely, and part of his sentence was served on relatively light duty at a recycling center for shoes and clothing. At age 19, he was released on Kim Jong Il's birthday. Five years later, in 1992, he escaped the country, helped by ethnic Koreans living in the borderlands of northeastern China. Now, Kang is a reporter for the Seoul newspaper Chosun Ilbo. His life experience is now his professional beat: North Korean affairs.

Another graduate of the prisons, Lee Soon Ok, had a rougher time of it. She had handled accounting and managerial work at a party distribution center. But when she rebuffed a security chief who demanded an extra jacket, Lee's fate was sealed. She was accused of embezzlement and disobeying party policy. The result: seven years at the No. 1 prison camp at Gaechun. "My family was split apart in one day," she says grimly.

At the camp, Lee was tapped to supervise production of exported goods: artificial silk flowers bound for France, handmade wool sweaters for Japan, decorative needlework for Poland. Suits and dress shirts were sold through Hong Kong, getting their origin labels there, before shipment to Europe. If quotas were missed, Lee says, she faced torture. Guards stepped on her head, knocking out teeth and skewing the left side of her face. During one beating, her left eye started to pop out of its socket. She pushed it back in with her fingers. Her arms were injured after she was hung in chains from a ceiling. Even now, she has difficulty sitting or standing for long periods.

Water torture. In interrogations aimed at forcing a confession, Lee, now 56, was also subjected to water torture. She says guards force-fed her water by pushing the spout of a canister into her mouth. They laid a wooden plank across her abdomen--and pressed down, forcing water out through her mouth, nose, and bladder. "It feels like your intestines are exploding. There's no way even to describe the pain you feel," she recalls, with no trace of emotion.

Tears well up, however, when she ponders why a true believer in the system like herself was punished. "I believed that Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were basically gods," she says quietly. "I was so loyal to the party, and I don't know why they put me through this."

Lee won release in 1993, apparently for her success in meeting production quotas, she says. The earnings had gone into a fund to celebrate Kim Il Sung's 80th birthday the previous year. By then, though, Lee was in no mood to celebrate. "As soon as I got out of prison, I decided I didn't want to live in that hell," she says. Lee fled with her son in 1995. She converted to Christianity, having marveled at jailed Christians who refused to renounce their faith in the face of torture and execution. Lee moved to an apartment block on the outskirts of Seoul. Still, she is plagued by feelings of guilt about those left behind. Her new life's mission is to expose the terrors of the camps. "I want the world to know how evil Kim Jong Il is," she says. "The world needs to put more pressure on North Korea."

- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 9:48 PM

 
I think now would be a good time to review documents that helped inspire my interest in the war on terror. One was this piece by the Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes on the Islamist agenda for the U.S. Pipes is a major and controversial figure in Middle East studies. He has raised the alarm about Islamic extremism here in the U.S. while being careful not to tar all Muslims as extremists. Pipes was nominated by President Bush to the Institute for Peace but he was challenged by some senators, concerned over Pipes's reputation for outspokenness on the issue of Islamic extremism. Many Muslim organizations organizations organized opposition to Pipes. He ultimately did receive the nomination by means of a recess appointment. It turns out that there are some within the Muslim community that are not really reconciled to the American democratic order. Here's the money quote:

"Zaid Shakir, formerly the Muslim chaplain at Yale University, has stated that Muslims cannot accept the legitimacy of the American secular system, which "is against the orders and ordainments of Allah." To the contrary, "The orientation of the Qur'an pushes us in the exact opposite direction." To Ahmad Nawfal, a leader of the Jordanian Muslim Brethren who speaks frequently at American Muslim rallies, the United States has "no thought, no values, and no ideals"; if militant Muslims "stand up, with the ideology that we possess, it will be very easy for us to preside over this world." Masudul Alam Choudhury, a Canadian professor of business, writes matter-of-factly and enthusiastically about the "Islamization agenda in North America."

"For a fuller exposition of this outlook, one can do no better than to turn to a 1989 book by Shamim A. Siddiqi, an influential commentator on American Muslim issues. Cryptically titled Methodology of Dawah Ilallah in American Perspective (more idiomatically rendered as "The Need to Convert Americans to Islam"), this 168-page study, published in Brooklyn, remains largely unavailable to general readers (neither amazon.com nor bookfinder.com listed it over a period of months) but is widely posted on Islamist websites, where it enjoys a faithful readership. In it, in prose that makes up in intensity and vividness for what it lacks in sophistication and polish, Siddiqi lays out both a detailed rationale and a concrete plan for Islamists to take over the United States and establish "Islamic rule" (iqamat ad-din)."

Another document is this one by Kay Hymowitz called "Why Feminism is AWOL on Islam". In this piece Hymowitz takes contemporary feminists to task for not focusing on human rights abuses against women (most notably the so-called "honor killings") in the Muslim world. She ascribes this feminist silence on Islamic-world abuses to the influence in recent decades of multiculturalism and postcolonialism which perceive that because of abuses in the third world by western powers in past centuries, therefore the behavior of the inhabitants of the third world are beyond criticism, even if what we would consider human rights abuses occur. Here's the money quote:

"You didn’t hear much from feminists as it emerged that honor killings by relatives, often either ignored or only lightly punished by authorities, are also commonplace in the Muslim world. In September, Reuters reported the story of an Iranian man, “defending my honor, family, and dignity,” who cut off his seven-year-old daughter’s head after suspecting she had been raped by her uncle. The postmortem showed the girl to be a virgin. In another family mix-up, a Yemeni man shot his daughter to death on her wedding night when her husband claimed she was not a virgin. After a medical exam revealed that the husband was mistaken, officials concluded he was simply trying to protect himself from embarrassment about his own impotence. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, every day two women are slain by male relatives seeking to avenge the family honor.

"The savagery of some of these murders is worth a moment’s pause. In 2000, two Punjabi sisters, 20 and 21 years old, had their throats slit by their brother and cousin because the girls were seen talking to two boys to whom they were not related. In one especially notorious case, an Egyptian woman named Nora Marzouk Ahmed fell in love and eloped. When she went to make amends with her father, he cut off her head and paraded it down the street. Several years back, according to the Washington Post, the husband of Zahida Perveen, a 32-year-old pregnant Pakistani, gouged out her eyes and sliced off her earlobe and nose because he suspected her of having an affair.

"In a related example widely covered last summer, a teenage girl in the Punjab was sentenced by a tribal council to rape by a gang that included one of the councilmen. After the hour-and-a-half ordeal, the girl was forced to walk home naked in front of scores of onlookers. She had been punished because her 11-year-old brother had compromised another girl by being been seen alone with her. But that charge turned out to be a ruse: it seems that three men of a neighboring tribe had sodomized the boy and accused him of illicit relations—an accusation leading to his sister’s barbaric punishment—as a way of covering up their crime.

"Nor is such brutality limited to backward, out-of-the-way villages. Muddassir Rizvi, a Pakistani journalist, says that, though always common in rural areas, in recent years honor killings have become more prevalent in cities “among educated and liberal families.” In relatively modern Jordan, honor killings were all but exempt from punishment until the penal code was modified last year; unfortunately, a young Palestinian living in Jordan, who had recently stabbed his 19-year-old sister 40 times “to cleanse the family honor,” and another man from near Amman, who ran over his 23-year-old sister with his truck because of her “immoral behavior,” had not yet changed their ways. British psychiatrist Anthony Daniels reports that British Muslim men frequently spirit their young daughters back to their native Pakistan and force the girls to marry. Such fathers have been known to kill daughters who resist. In Sweden, in one highly publicized case, Fadima Sahindal, an assimilated 26-year-old of Kurdish origin, was murdered by her father after she began living with her Swedish boyfriend. “The whore is dead,” the family announced.

"As you look at this inventory of brutality, the question bears repeating: Where are the demonstrations, the articles, the petitions, the resolutions, the vindications of the rights of Islamic women by American feminists? The weird fact is that, even after the excesses of the Taliban did more to forge an American consensus about women’s rights than 30 years of speeches by Gloria Steinem, feminists refused to touch this subject. They have averted their eyes from the harsh, blatant oppression of millions of women, even while they have continued to stare into the Western patriarchal abyss, indignant over female executives who cannot join an exclusive golf club and college women who do not have their own lacrosse teams.

"But look more deeply into the matter, and you realize that the sound of feminist silence about the savage fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women has its own perverse logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way feminist theory has developed in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous sentimentalism, multicultural nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has lost the language to make the universalist moral claims of equal dignity and individual freedom that once rendered it so compelling. No wonder that most Americans, trying to deal with the realities of a post-9/11 world, are paying feminists no mind."


- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 6:29 PM

 
Here's another outstanding piece from the U.S. News and World Report website about the conflict between women's rights and traditional Islamic theology. Women in the Islamic world are trying to reconcile the legal code of Islam (called the sharia) with modern notions of human rights. They must try to convince men to give up their allegiance to family and tribe which in the Islamic world subordinates individual rights. The best way to do this is by advancing their economic position. Here's the money quote:

Women's rights face an uncertain future throughout much of the Islamic world--though nowhere more pointedly than in the constitution-making efforts now underway in both Afghanistan and Iraq. In two nations widely viewed as test cases of the compatibility of Islamic and universal values, it remains to be seen whether and how the principles of sharia, or even the more general spirit of Islamic traditions, will inform their future laws. And behind those uncertainties loom even broader questions facing Muslim women everywhere. In particular, rights activists wonder, are the foundations of Islamic law and theology compatible with international standards of human rights in general and women's right in particular? And if so, what must be done to surmount the practical hurdles--including the crucial matter of who interprets the law--that stand in the way of reconciling Islam with universal principles of women's rights?

Muslim women themselves are already actively engaged with these issues. "When I talk with educated women from Morocco to Pakistan," says Ann Mayer, a professor of legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and author of Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics, "I find that they are much more inclined to evaluate their condition in relation to international standards of human rights. And they say that international standards only reinforce Islamic standards."

- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 10:05 PM

 
Finally! the utility allowing readers to post comments seems to be working!
- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 7:46 PM

 
Here's a scary threat from a new al-Qaeda linked group called the "Islamic Bayan Group". They issued a call for Muslims to leave New York City, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles in anticipation of al-Qaeda attacks on those cities. I've seen this story linked to a few news websites and discussion forums in recent days but there has been zilch in the mainstream media. The Homeland Security Department's threat level hasn't even been raised. I'm wondering what all the silence is about!
- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 7:28 PM

 
I found just an outstanding piece from the US News and World report magazine website about the spread of anti-Semitism around the world. The attacks might be expected in the Arab world but the new anti-Semitism has become almost mainstream in otherwise reputable publications. There has been an accompanying rise in anti-Jewish violence throughout Europe. Here's the money quote:

"AMERICANS, WHO HAVE COME to take for granted the scurrilous anti-Semitism that routinely appears in the Arab press, might be amazed by what now appears in the sophisticated European press. In England, the guardian wrote that "Israel has no right to exist." The observer described Israeli settlements in the West Bank as "an affront to civilization." The New Statesman ran a story titled "A Kosher Conspiracy," illustrated by a cover showing the gold Star of David piercing the Union Jack. The story implies that a Zionist-Jewish cabal is attempting to sway the British press to the cause of Israel. In France, the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur published an extraordinary libel alleging that Israeli soldiers raped Palestinian women so that their relatives would kill them to preserve family honor. In Italy, the Vatican's L'Osservatore Romano spoke of Israel's "aggression that's turning into extermination," while the daily La Stampa ran a Page 1 cartoon of a tank emblazoned with the Jewish star pointing its big gun at the infant Jesus, who cries out, "Surely they don't want to kill me again."

"Across Europe, the result has been not just verbal violence but physical. A report issued last year by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, titled "Fire and Broken Glass," describes the assaults on Jews and people presumed to be Jewish across Europe. Attackers, shouting racist slogans, throw stones at schoolchildren, at worshipers attending religious services, at rabbis. Jewish homes, schools, and synagogues are firebombed. Windows are smashed, Jewish cemeteries desecrated with anti-Jewish slogans. In just a few weeks in the spring of last year, French synagogues and Jewish schools, students, and homes were attacked and firebombed. A synagogue in Marseilles was burned to the ground. In Paris, Jews were attacked by groups of hooded men. According to police, metropolitan Paris saw something like a dozen anti-Jewish incidents a day in the first several months after Easter."

The thrust of much of this anti-Semitism has been to de-legitimize the state of Israel and its right to exist and defend itself. Anti-Zionism has become a mask for anti-Semitism. The article also shows how the actions of neighboring Arab governments contributed to the plight of the Palestinians after WWII.
- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 9:31 PM

 
Here's an article from Australia with profound legal implications. It seems a group of Muslims are suing a Christian organization over what it claims is an attempt to vilify Islam in its evangelical work. It raises the issue of free speech, the right to say whatever we want and not be subject to prosecution versus hate speech, the right not to be harmed by the incitement of hatred. I would come down on the side of free speech, because I don't think it is wrong to examine the beliefs or practices of any religion. The concern for hate speech would kick in if anyone directly told sympathizers or followers to damage or harm another person or organization because they held or advocated a different point of view, which does not appear to be the case here. The Christians told followers to "'love and pray for" Muslims. The Muslims certainly have the right to defend themselves but I just don't think this rises to the level of "hate speech" and I think it could well have a chilling effect on public debate if the suit is upheld.
- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 11:37 PM