Category Archives: State Oppression

High-flying professor faces US terror trial

Posted on by Bob Pitt

samialarianUniversity of Florida professor Sami al-Arian goes on trial today in what is being billed as the most important terrorism case in the United States since September 11.

Prosecutors claim that Dr Arian, and three other Arab-Americans who will be in the dock with him, commanded an Islamic Jihad cell that flourished in Tampa and infiltrated the University of South Florida. The group is said to have helped finance a series of attacks in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel in which more than 100 people died, including at least one American.

However, supporters and lawyers for the Kuwait-born professor claim that it is not a straightforward case of terrorist funding. Instead, they say it raises serious issues about anti-Muslim bias in the US post-September 11, freedom of speech and what they see as a blatant attempt by Israel to silence a powerful Palestinian voice in America.

Guardian, 6 June 2005

One Muslim’s odyssey to Guantánamo

Posted on by Bob Pitt

muratkurnazRichard Bernstein examines the case of Guantánamo detainee Murat Kurnaz, a 19-year-old Muslim from Germany, who was arrested in Pakistan in 2001 and handed over to US forces to face imprisonment and torture.

New York Times, 5 June 2005

No doubt this is the sort of person General Richard Myers had in mind when he claimed that Guantánamo detainees would “slit our children’s throats” if they were freed. See here.

Liberal joins neocons in anti-Amnesty campaign

Posted on by Bob Pitt

irenekhan2The speech by Amnesty general secretary Irene Khan describing Guantánamo as the “gulag of our times” (see here) reduced the US right to apoplexy. From Donald Rumsfeld down, they united to deny there was any parallel between incarcerating millions of Soviet citizens and locking up a mere 600 Muslims. See here, here, here, here, here and so ad infinitum.

Now here’s a test for you. Which journalist on a liberal Sunday newspaper could be relied upon to echo the anti-Amnesty propaganda of the US neocons?

Continue reading →

You can’t talk to an FBI agent that way, or can you?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Dressed in a navy suit and red tie, his hair parted neatly on the side, Special Agent Charles E. Frahm sat with practiced calm as Muslims rose, one after another, to hurl raw complaints at him. Mr. Frahm, who heads the counterterrorism division of the F.B.I. in New York, was at a banquet hall in the Midwood section of Brooklyn on Thursday night to listen, he had told the hundreds of residents gathered there.

And they responded. They were tired of being held for hours at airports when their names resembled those of suspected terrorists, they said. They were tired of seeing Muslims arrested on immigration charges. They were tired of having their mosques watched, their businesses scrutinized.

“America is our land!” Faruq Wadud, a Bangledeshi man, hollered hoarsely into the microphone as the room broke into a thunderous applause. “We are not foreigners! Our children, this is their motherland!”

New York Times, 4 June 2005

‘Gitmo grovel: enough already’ – Charles Krauthammer

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Guantanamo-1“Should the United States apologize? If there were mishandlings of the Koran, we should say so and express regret. And that should be in the context of our remarkably humane and tolerant treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners, and in the context of a global war on terrorism (for example, the campaign in Afghanistan) conducted with a discrimination and a concern for civilian safety rarely seen in the annals of warfare. Then we should get over it, stop whimpering and start defending ourselves.”

Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post, 3 June 2005

Victor Davis Hanson agrees: “Like a parent with a naughty child, a maddening forbearance is the order of the day: They burn American flags, behead, murder, and promise death and ruin to Americans; we ignore it and instead find new ways of displaying our sensitivity to Islam.” His advice is to “press on. We apprise Syria to cease all sanctuary for al Qaedists and Iran to give up its nuclear program – or face surgical and punitive American air strikes.”

National Review, 3 June 2005

Melanie Phillips wholeheartedly endorses these “two tremendous articles” which “pinpoint the profound sickness of the west in turning upon itself over its defence against the war being waged against it rather than turning on its attackers”. She warns that “the war being waged with escalating ferocity within the west by its decadent elites, along with some alarming moral and intellectual confusion within the Bush administration – and, most crucially, a fundamental fear of confronting the religious ideology that is driving this monster – could yet be our undoing”.

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 3 June 2005

US Guantánamo guard kicked Koran

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The US has given details of how guards mishandled copies of the Koran at its Guantánamo Bay prison, including a case of one copy being deliberately kicked. The US listed five incidents of mishandling at the Cuban facility, including the splashing of urine and water on copies of the Koran.

The report said most of the cases were accidental or unintentional. It also said that there were a number of cases where detainees had desecrated the Koran by ripping pages, urinating on it and trying to flush it down a toilet.

BBC News, 4 June 2005

Desecrating the Qur’an: The straw that broke the camel’s back

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Some non-Muslims are asking: ‘Why are Muslims so upset about the desecration of the Qur’an while there were no protests when their own fellow Muslims were being tortured and killed?’ There are several responses. First, the Qur’an is a sacred book because it is the Word of God; therefore, it is natural to be outraged by its desecration. Second, of course Muslims are also distressed and outraged by the torture and killing of their fellow sisters and brothers. Third, I believe that the desecration of the Qur’an was the catalyst for protests by Muslims all over the world because after the deaths of thousands of civilians in Palestine, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Iraq, the exposure of the Abu Ghraib pictures and the revelations of torture in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay by American soldiers, in my opinion, the desecration of the Qur’an was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Bint Adam writes. Islam Online, 2 June 2005

Bush says Amnesty report ‘absurd’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

US President George Bush has dismissed as “absurd” an Amnesty International report that said the US was setting back the cause of human rights. The human rights group described the US Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba as “the gulag of our time”. There have been allegations that guards at the camp had desecrated the Koran, prompting protests in Muslim countries. But Mr Bush said on Tuesday: “The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world.”

BBC News, 31 May 2005

Earlier, US general Richard Myers has described Amnesty’s report as “absolutely irresponsible”. How do you handle people who … who aren’t part of a nation-state effort, that are picked up on the battlefield … that if you release them, or if you let them go back to their home countries, that would turn right around and try to slit our throats, our children’s throats?” he said.

BBC News, 30 May 2005

Cf. the evidence of former US Sgt Erik Saar who stated that, of the 600 prisoners held at Guantánamo, no more than a few dozen were “hardcore terrorists”. He added: “The US Government portrays Guantánamo as a place where we are sending the worst of the worst, but this is not true. Guantánamo … set a precedent in labelling people as enemy combatants, blurring the line between right and wrong. You can see it as the seed that may well have led to the naked human pyramids in Abu Ghraib.”

BBC News, 9 May 2005

Still, Michelle Malkin has read Saar’s account of abuse at Guantánamo, and declares herself impressed by “just how restrained, and sensitive to Islam – to a fault, I believe – the officials at the detention facility have been”.

Townhall.com, 1 June 2005

For Amnesty’s reply to Bush, see here.

Discover the terrorist-supporting commies

Posted on by Bob Pitt

guantanamo-bay“The detention facilities at Guantánamo, including Camp X-ray and Camp Delta, were constructed specifically to house individuals apprehended in the war on terror. Enemy combatants held at the camp must be foreign nationals who have either received training from al Qaeda, or who have been in command of 300 or more military personnel. They are among the world’s most brutal and committed Islamist enemies of the United States. By incarcerating and interrogating them, the U.S. hopes to gain crucial intelligence that could thwart future terrorist attacks against America and to keep them from returning to the terror war against the United States.”

Well, that’s reassuring. Thank God for Discoverthenetworks.org, is all I can say. They also provide a useful exposé of the Guantánamo Human Rights Commission, succinctly defined as a “human rights group committed to defending Islamic jihadists captured on the field of battle in Afghanistan and being detained at Guantánamo Bay”.

The piece continues: “The GHRC was founded by actress Vanessa Redgrave, a Trotskyite with a venomous hostility towards the state of Israel, and her brother, actor Corin Redgrave. A founder of the Marxist Party and a supporter of the Communist Workers Revolutionary Party, Ms. Redgrave has a long history of supporting terrorists…. GHRC co-founder Corin Redgrave is also a committed Communist and an apologist for terrorists.”

Discoverthenetworks.org, 1 June 2005

Discoverthenetworks deserve credit for exposing this plot against the free world. As a glance at its website reveals, the Guantánamo Human Rights Commission includes among its sponsors such notorious figures as Peter Bottomley, Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP, Margaret Drabble, the Bishop of Oxford and other well-known supporters of Islamist terrorism.