Minarets (Turkish: minare,[1] from Arabic manāra (lighthouse) منارة, usually مئذنة) are distinctive architectural features of Islamic mosques. Minarets are generally tall spires with onion-shaped or conical crowns, usually either free-standing or taller than any associated support structure, states a source from Wikipedia …http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minaret
The main function of the minaret is to provide a vantage point from which the call to prayer (adhan) is made. Call to prayer in Islam happens five times each day, and is a very important ritual required of all who practice Islam.
Voters in Switzerland chose to take a step in the direction of Nazi Germany, and collectively decided to restrict and to persecute Islam and the religious practices required by those who are Islamic.
The BBC is reporting from Geneva,Switzerland that in a vote that displayed a widespread anxiety about Islam and undermined the country’s reputation for religious tolerance, the Swiss on Sunday overwhelmingly imposed a national ban on the construction of minarets, the prayer towers of mosques, in a referendum drawn up by the far right and opposed by the government.
Swiss voters’ clear decision on Sunday to ban the construction of minarets has generated a wide range of emotions,supporters of the initiative said the Swiss electorate wanted to put a brake on the Islamization of their country, whereas opponents were concerned about the violation of rights, not to mention an international backlash and possible boycott of Swiss products.
Forced marriages and other things like cemeteries separating the pure and impure – we don’t have that in Switzerland and we don’t want to introduce it,” said Ulrich Schlüer, co-president of the Initiative Committee to ban minarets.
Amnesty International has expressed deep regret over the Swiss voters’ approval of a ban on minarets, calling it a violation of religious freedom for Muslims.
“The ‘yes’ vote comes as a surprise and a great disappointment,” David Diaz-Jogeix, Amnesty International’s deputy program director for Europe and Central Asia, said on Monday.
The Swiss Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but the rightist Swiss People’s Party, or S.V.P., and a small religious party had proposed inserting a single sentence banning the construction of minarets, leading to the referendum.
The Swiss government said it would respect the vote and sought to reassure the Muslim population — mostly immigrants from other parts of Europe, like Kosovo and Turkey — that the minaret ban was “not a rejection of the Muslim community, religion or culture.”
The president of the People’s Party, Toni Brunner, said voters had clearly rejected the idea of parallel societies and the further expansion of Islam – including radical, political Islam – in Switzerland.
Saida Keller-Messahli, president of the Forum for an Advanced Islam, said the public’s fears had been too great and “hatred had won over reason”.
She said there would now be legal consequences, since the ban violated the freedom of religion.
The Federation of Islamic Organisations in Switzerland also regretted the result, saying the propaganda of the campaign supporters had succeeded in frightening the majority of voters.
The federation said it was too soon to judge the negative social and legal consequences – what was important now was to strengthen their public relations and clear up any misunderstandings or prejudices concerning Islam.
“Switzerland has lost,” said Rifa’at Lenzin from the European Project for Interreligious Learning in Zürich, adding that the country was “leading the way” for Islamophobia.
“Switzerland is heading straight for a battle with Islam,” he said, adding that he feared a boycott of Swiss products.
The ban on minarets’ violates the right of Muslims to manifest their religion in Switzerland, and is incompatible with the international conventions signed by the European country.
It is to note that this is similar to the way that Nazi Germany, under the rule of Hitler, was able to gradually assert their main agenda, which was to exterminate the Jewish religion and all those who practice it.
It appears as though the Islamic citizens of Switzerland need to prepare for similar treatment, and mounting restrictions on the practice of their religion.
Swiss Ban Minarets,and restrict the practice of Islam
Let’s never have this disgrace ever happen in the United States of America….Shame on Switzerland.
Iraq Inquiry: 4th day of public hearings with Greenstock
By Julie
This post, like the – 1st Day and the 2nd Day and the 3rd Day comes with my grateful thanks to Julie here
Also see Iraq Inquiry timetable of hearings, who and when
These are the most significant quotes from the fourth session of the Iraq Inquiry
You can read the full transcript of the morning session here
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4th day of public hearings
27th November 2009: Morning session: Evidence by
Sir Jeremy Greenstock (from 1998 until July 2003)
Greenstock:
“By the beginning of 2001, which, of course, was also the moment when the new American administration came on the scene, the containment of Iraq was flawed and was regarded by everybody as flawed, by those who thought the sanctions regime should be maintained and by those who thought that the sanctions regime should not be maintained.”
“I don’t think there was a single member of the Security Council who believed that Iraq was trying honestly and honourably to meet Security Council conditions. I don’t think there was a single member of Security Council, throughout my period there, who supported Saddam Hussein or Iraq. I don’t think there was a single member of the Security Council who believed that Iraq was innocent, was not plotting to develop military capability, was not defying United Nations, was not cheating on sanctions.”
“The United Kingdom had a different approach from the United States, to the extent that we believed that action on or against Iraq should be unequivocally collective, that it had to be based on Security Council Resolutions, that it had, if at all possible, to avoid the use of force, but also that it had to be effective, that it had to remove nationally any threat which Saddam Hussein and his regime might pose to the vital interests of the United Kingdom, and collectively would remove the defiance by Iraq of the United Nations Resolutions.”
“It wasn’t until the Crawford meeting in April 2002 that I realised that the United Kingdom was being drawn into quite a different sort of discussion”
“The Secretary General, Kofi Annan, took it upon himself to have his own bilateral discussions with the Iraqis, which happened, I think, first of all in March and extended through to about July, because, as I understand it, he, himself, was worried that unless the UN effort on maintaining the sanctions regime and the other UN measures on Iraq was more successful, the United States might have a valid reason, in politics at least, if not in Security Council Resolution terms, to take another route, and so he took his own initiative as a mission of good offices, which the Secretary General can perform, to see whether there was more room to persuade the Iraqis that the inspectors should return. So he went through those discussions, which the US looked upon as a side issue, not likely to produce any good results, up until July, when I think Secretary General Annan decided not least on the basis of his past experience in dealing with the Iraqis, that he was being led down a track and he gave up those discussions in July.”
“After the resolution was adopted, things began to drift in two directions; that the US and the UK took the terms of 1441 absolutely literally, which is the fair and just thing to do with a resolution that takes on the force of a legal declaration, whereas the French and others interpreted the resolution as meaning that there was scope for the Security Council to meet, and, if the Security Council met, under normal Security Council practice, since the Security Council was responsible for international peace and security, only the Security Council should take a decision on whether or not force should be used.”
“It was the point of view of the United Kingdom that the use of force could not be justified unless every other avenue had been tried to bring Iraq into compliance.”
“There was, as part of the lead up to the negotiation of 1441, the idea that there should be a pair of resolutions, not a single one in 1441 that should have the inspectors’ conditions in one part and in the second resolution the consequences for Iraq on what would happen if they didn’t comply with the first one. There was the possibility of passing those resolutions either together and simultaneously or sequentially in time. As it happened, in 1441 we built those two elements into a single text and it was successfully negotiated and passed unanimously on 8 November as a single text.”
“We felt that with 1441 that was sufficient legal cover so long as it was made clear that Saddam Hussein was not cooperating under the operative paragraph number 2 of 1441 that give him a final chance to show that he was cooperating. That was our criterion.”
“It was actually quite surprising to me that only the Mexican delegation said unequivocally that they expected that, if it came to the use of force, it would be solely the Security Council that had the authority to take that decision.”
“President Chirac said at some point, I think in the summer of 2002 to President Bush, as I saw in other papers, that France believed that Saddam Hussein was developing biological and chemical materials.”
(Referring to WMDs) “I don’t believe that even Moscow could say, “We are sure there are none.”
(On whether there is a smoking gun or not) “That wasn’t where I came from. I thought there was something there. I actually still believe there is something there, but it is a question of what that something is now.”
“Before the war actually started, the Iraqi Air Force buried a number of Russian jets in the sand, which overhead telemetry didn’t notice them doing. It was only when the wind blew the sand away from those jets that the tails stuck out of the sand and we discovered that they had buried some aircraft. If they can get away with burying aircraft in the sand, they are going to be quite good at burying much smaller things in the sand.”
(On national interests) “I do not have firsthand evidence of that, but I was very well aware of, from reading other people’s reports, that this might well be a factor because the Russian and French debt from Iraq, the Iraqi debt to those two nations, was in many billions of dollars resulting from the Iran/Iraq war purchases and they wanted sanctions to be lifted so they could get some of their money back.”
“In my personal contact with my colleagues at the United Nations, I understood that the UK had been given a good deal of credit for trying diplomacy up to the last minute, in spite of the noises off, and there is something bigger than all of that: in the fact that the United Kingdom was part of this military operation, that the United States was not completely alone, we ensured whether it was intentional or not, but this was the effect that the international community, the Security Council, the members of the United Nations, remained able to talk to each other after this had all blown up in our faces, when, if the United States had gone about this operation unilaterally, solely, there would have been a huge division between the United States and the rest of the international community.”
“It was certainly my view at the time, whether it remains my view now, that the containment of Iraq through United Nations’ measures would progressively have continued to erode and the smuggling capabilities and the smuggling results in terms of Iraq’s wish to increase its military and economic capacity, would have been disadvantageous for UK national interests in the Middle East and internationally.”
“The United Nations is a forum of its member states, it is not a separate agency to deal with something, and there is no doubt that the United Nations, over 12 years, failed to deal with the fact that they were being defied by Saddam Hussein. That aspect of the formation of UK policy, I think, has to be remembered, that we were trying to defend the United Nations from being eroded by successful noncompliance by a member state just as much as we were trying to deal with the threat posed by the Iraqi possession of dangerous weapons, and that is a consideration that should come into your discussions.”
Important exchanges:
PRASHAR: “You referred earlier the use of the word “legitimate”, can you unpack that for me a little as to what you mean by the word “legitimate” in terms of justifying war? It is really that I would like some explanation of that. “
GREENSTOCK: In international law there is no Supreme Court. It is up to a nation state to make its own national decision as to whether to adhere to the judgments of the International Court of Justice or not. Iraq was not a treaty based member of the International Court of Justice, so that didn’t come into it, probably, in our consideration of what we were doing with Iraq. But short of that, it is possible to have a firm legal opinion on the legality of action under the UN charter for a particular operation. But it is also possible for there to be many different legal opinions as to what is actually legal without having an apex arbiter of what is legal or what is not. So we are still in the position, even now in 2009, of having legal opinions out there that say that what we did in March 2003 was legal and what we did in March 2003 was illegal, and except as a matter of opinion, you can’t establish in law which of those two opinions are right finally and conclusively. When you get to legitimacy, it is a very fair way of describing that if you have got broad opinion behind you, broad, reasonable opinion behind you, you are doing something that is defensible in a democratic environment. To some extent, the United Nations is a democratic environment. It is a forum of equal states equally signed up by treaty to the United Nations Charter, and each of those states have an opinion. If you do something internationally that the majority of UN member states think is wrong or illegitimate or politically unjustifiable, you are taking a risk in my view, and increasingly and I think one of the lessons you may want to look at as an Inquiry is on the importance of legitimacy in geopolitical affairs nowadays. I regarded our invasion of Iraq our participation in the military action against Iraq in March 2003 as legal but of questionable legitimacy, in that it didn’t have the democratically observable backing of a great majority of member states or even perhaps of a majority of people inside the United Kingdom. So there was a failure to establish legitimacy, although I think we successfully established legality in the Security Council in the United Nations for both our actions in December 1998 and our actions in March 2003 to the degree at least that we were never challenged in the Security Council or in the International Court of Justice, for those actions.”
PRASHAR: “Just one question before we break up, on the weapons of mass destruction and the question of disarmament, were there differing views within the Security Council? I mean, did anybody challenge the fact that the Saddam had weapons of mass destruction during this period that we have been discussing?”
GREENSTOCK: “No colleague on the Security Council ever came up to me at any point and said, “You are barking up the wrong tree. You are hopelessly on the wrong track here, because we know that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction”. No member of the Security Council, not Hans Blix, not Mohammed ElBaradei, nobody, said to the United Kingdom, and I don’t believe they said to the United States, “We know that the Iraqi Government has no weapons of mass destruction.”
GREENSTOCK: “Actually, if you look at the wording of 1441, it comes very close to being a report of a material breach.”
CHAIRMAN: “Both before and after the “and”.
GREENSTOCK: “Because the declaration was clearly inadequate. Even with hindsight, that declaration is inadequate, and they were not cooperating fully, completely, finally: material breach.”
Esta pequena entrada é só para dizer que toda esta imensa preocupação em fazer passar a mensagem que o aumento de CO2 é mau e negativo para a vida na terra (o que é FALSO), tem tudo a ver com dois simples pormenores que se encontram em todos os projectos da Nova (Des)Ordem Mundial.
“Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control people.”
Henry Kissinger
1º Controlo dos povos e controlo do número de seres humanos na terra, por isso o combate ao CO2 é tão importante para estes senhores, é que como se sabe o aumento de CO2 melhora e muito a produção de alimentos o que vai frontalmente contra o Controlo Populacional defendido há muito tempo e sobre o qual o assassino Kissinger escreveu no famoso memorando, NSSM 200.
The bogus arguments that Kissinger advanced were not original. One of his major sources was the Royal Commission on Population, which King George VI had created in 1944 “to consider what measures should be taken in the national interest to influence the future trend of population.” The commission found that Britain was gravely threatened by population growth in its colonies, since “a populous country has decided advantages over a sparsely-populated one for industrial production.” The combined effects of increasing population and industrialization in its colonies, it warned, “might be decisive in its effects on the prestige and influence of the West,” especially effecting “military strength and security.”
NSSM 200 similarly concluded that the United States was threatened by population growth in the former colonial sector. It paid special attention to 13 “key countries” in which the United States had a “special political and strategic interest”: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Turkey, Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. It claimed that population growth in those states was especially worrisome, since it would quickly increase their relative political, economic, and military strength.
(…)
There were several measures that Kissinger advocated to deal with this alleged threat, most prominently, birth control and related population-reduction programs. He also warned that “population growth rates are likely to increase appreciably before they begin to decline,” even if such measures were adopted.
A second measure was curtailing food supplies to targetted states, in part to force compliance with birth control policies: “There is also some established precedent for taking account of family planning performance in appraisal of assistance requirements by AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] and consultative groups. Since population growth is a major determinant of increases in food demand, allocation of scarce PL 480 resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production. In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion.”
Mais uma vez se demonstra que o problema deste planeta, continua a ser o Império Britânico que na realidade nunca terminou, apenas se expandiu, tornando-se no Império Anglo-Americano, mas com sede em Londres, contráriamente ao que se poderia pensar.
Uma pequena dica sobre este último parágrafo, porque razão acham que em Londres existe um Obelisco, com duas Esfinges de cada lado?
Londres
Egipto
2º Em todos estes projectos da elite oligarca, do poder/Governo sombra, para além de de nos quererem destruir, matar e escravizar os restantes, existe algo que lhes é comum, os OBSCENOS LUCROS que esta corja realiza com eles.
Dois exemplos paradigmáticos são a actual histeria à volta da gripe AH1N1 e os LUCROS avultadissimos que a oligarquia tem realizado com todo este esquema de medo.
E claro o chamado ‘Aquecimento Global’ e o tal combate ao CO2, onde mais uma vez já começam a aparecer os milionários, como é o caso do mentiroso patológico Al Gore, bem como George Soros entre outros, inclusive o vencedor do Prémio Nobel da Paz deste ano, o fantoche mor Obama.
No artigo de hoje do Mitos Climáticos têm lá uma tabela dos patrocínios aos ‘cientistas’ que defendem estas teses do ‘Aquecimento Global’.
E claro por cá também temos os defensores, os esbirros, destes senhores e destas políticas.
Por último apenas uma indicação para um livro interessante, “A Century of War” de F. William Engdahl que habitualmente escreve para o site Global Research, aconselho sem dúvida a leitura deste artigo sobre o Cofre das Sementes de Svalbard.[em protuguês]
The Three Pillars of the British Empire
Geopolitical history for the last 100 years was shaped around the quest for what Big Oil acolyte Daniel Yergin called “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power” with two countries at its epicenter – first Britain and now America with its UK junior partner that built its rule on three essential pillars:
– controlling the seas and setting the terms of trade;
– dominating world banking and manipulating the world’s largest gold supply; and
– controlling world raw materials with oil the key one at the turn of the century; with these working, it devised an “informal empire” to loot world wealth and maintain a balance of power on the continent.
Britain’s “genius” was being able to shift alliances without letting sentiment interfere with its interests. Post-Waterloo, it operated “on an extremely sophisticated marriage between top (London) bankers and financiers, government cabinet ministers,” key industrialists and espionage chiefs. By keeping everything secret, it “wielded immense power over credulous and unsuspecting foreign economies.” By the late 19th century, however, things began to change, and a new strategy was needed. Key to it was oil geopolitics as a vital naval supremacy ingredient.
So, despite my suspicions about how the Iraq war inquiry will eventually end, I will admit watching the proceedings is fairly interesting, even if it mostly reaffirms what we have heard from other quarters. There have been some surprises, but not many. Anyway, an overview:
The USA was making noises about invasion as far back as 2001, though it varied as to how seriously these claims were made and taken by various officials.
9/11 sounded a death knell for the policy of containment and the ascendency of Iraq war hawks in the Bush administration.
The British foreign policy establishment were initially wary of such attitudes, because of the legal status of such a war (in the words of Sir William Patey “we dismissed it at the time because it had no basis in law”).
Blair’s attitude began to shift in early 2002, though there is no agreement over whether this was due to the Crawford ranch meeting or not. Sir Peter Ricketts, chairmain of JIC, claims that up until March 2002 there was “no increased appetite” among ministers for regime change via invasion.
MI6 dismissed the claim of links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. There was no evidence of any serious cooperation.
Iran, Libya, North Korea and the continuing war in Afghanistan were considered to be more serious concerns to British security.
Intelligence concerning WMD wasn’t as coherent on the likelihood of a threat as was claimed to be. In the words of Sir William Ehrman, earlier intelligence about Hussein’s WMDs and missiles was “sporadic and patchy”. This contrasts with Blair’s claims that intelligence assessments had established “beyond a doubt” that Saddam had such programs underway.
Tim Dowse, head of counter-proliferation at the FCO was certain WMD would be found.
The 45 minutes claim, as well as that of “mass evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories” were not supported by the evidence.
UNSC Resolution 1441 was designed as a trip-wire to justify a war.
Weapons inspections were not given time to work
There are a couple of things I’d like to discuss in detail, but that will have to wait for another post. In the meantime, there is always the Iraq Inquiry Digest, if you want more.
(WASHINGTON, D.C., 7/4/06) – The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called for stepped up outreach efforts by the Muslim community in Maine after a severed pig’s head was thrown into one of that state’s mosques during prayers. CAIR said the frozen pig’s head was rolled into the Lewiston Auburn Islamic Center late Monday as worshipers bowed in prayer. The Washington-based Islamic civil rights and advocacy group said the use of pigs or pork products is a favorite theme of Islamophobic bigots who wish to attack or insult Muslims. Muslims are prohibited from eating pork. LINK
LEWISTON — A national Muslim civil rights organization TERRORIST FRONT GROUP has filed a formal request with the Lewiston School Department to allow a middle school student to pray on school property. The group also wants Lewiston to modify existing policy and provide “constitutionally protected religious accommodation,” such as a designated prayer room.
El gran error de los islamístas es que son racístas. Ellos se creen que Europa y América fueron poderosas solamente por la gente (étnia) que las poblaron. Entonces razonan: si les implantamos el Islam, éste será poderoso y dominará al mundo. Ésto es equivocado, Europa y América fueron grandes por la doctrina que impulsó a la gente, por sus ideales, por su filosofía.
Si se reprimen estas raíces y se reemplazan por el Islam, las etnias europeas no seran muy diferentes que las árabes y ambos continentes se transformaran en páramos, salvajes , rebeldes violentos, sometidos a la explosión demografica y al analfabetísmo y con ciudadanos destinados a trabajar como0 esclavos y no llegar a la ancianidad.
Si a los europeos se les asesinan sus raíces ideologicas, entonces Europa y America habrán muerto, el Islam no se puede injertar en ellos, no puede convivir con otra filosofía, no es asimilable y sus resultados en las sociedades estan a la vista, basta con recorrer los países islamicos y ver como viven, producen, crean, investigan,progresan. Si no fuera por el petroleo y los intereses economicos de Occidente no tendrían ni siquiera ciudades sino tiendas y poblados.
Figured I’d post about my paying job for a minute. I’m sure you’ve all seen these markings on either sidewalks or raodways and wondered WTF are these? They are often seen in different colors but the more prominant ones are; Red, Yellow, Blue, Green and often inside a marked area in White. The paint itself is not permanent and will eventually fade.
Each color identifies a utility; Electrical, Gas, Potable Water, Sewer/Storm line respectively. Most people who mark are minimalists and some get real technical using industry abbrev. that identify material, size and even depth. Pretty straight forward stuff for excavation work. So that “Joe Dirt” doesn’t sever your power, water and poop water leaving you a caveman/woman/family for several hours eating cold Ligo sardines and rice, which is pretty damn tasty.
The industry mantra is “Call before you dig” meaning all proposed excavations must be called into USA North, a third party that sends out notifications to agencies and operators of a proposed project. Each operator/agency is required to locate and mark their particular utility within the proposed work area marked in white with the words USA. Mark’em if you gottem!
Obviously roadways and sidewalks can get pretty colorful if it’s a large project, which can really piss off some of the residents in my municipality. Often times they don’t care to know what they are for, despite every attempt to explain their importance so their services won’t be affected by “Joe Dirt” wanking on the heavy equipment joystick. “I don’t like how it looks”, “can’t you use a more subdued color that matches the roadway?”, how long will I have to look at it?”, I have visitors coming from out of town and this is not acceptable”, “can’t you write smaller?” “I’m calling the police as I consider this graffiti, what is your name?”…Donald “effen” Duck ma’m. O_o
Graffiti you say!? I may just have to keep practicing my handstyle. Montana paint, anyone?
Even as U.S. troops surge to new highs in Afghanistan they are outnumbered by military contractors working alongside them, according to a Defense Department census due to be distributed to Congress — illustrating how hard it is for the U.S. to wean itself from the large numbers of war-zone contractors that proved controversial in Iraq.
The number of military contractors in Afghanistan rose to almost 74,000 by June 30, far outnumbering the roughly 58,000 U.S. soldiers on the ground at that point. As the military force in Afghanistan grows further, to a planned 68,000 by the end of the year, the Defense Department expects the ranks of contractors to increase more.
Forced marriages and other things like cemeteries separating the pure and impure – we don’t have that in Switzerland and we don’t want to introduce it,” said Ulrich Schlüer, co-president of the Initiative Committee to ban minarets.
“Switzerland has lost,” said Rifa’at Lenzin from the European Project for Interreligious Learning in Zürich, adding that the country was “leading the way” for Islamophobia.
By Julie
LEWISTON — A national Muslim civil rights organization TERRORIST FRONT GROUP has filed a formal request with the Lewiston School Department to allow a middle school student to pray on school property. The group also wants Lewiston to modify existing policy and provide “constitutionally protected religious accommodation,” such as a designated prayer room.
