Those who worry that the world’s Arab and Muslim populations pose a threat to free speech in Western democracies need not fear. The first Amendment remains intact-particularly, it seems, when it comes to the “right” to inflict racial slurs. Indeed, the last few weeks have witnessed a spate of pundits and politicians exercising their right to freely engage in racist demagoguery against Arabs and Muslims without repercussion.

Celebrity hatemonger Ann Coulter did not disappoint the rabid crowd at the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C. last month. The highlight of Coulter’s address, sandwiched between speeches by Dick Cheney, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Newt Gingrich, was, “I think our motto should be post-9-11, ‘raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.'” Journalist Max Blumenthal remarked, “This declaration prompted a boisterous ovation” from the overflow crowd.
counterpunch.org

NEW DELHI — Tens of thousands of Indians waving black and white flags and chanting “Death to Bush!” rallied Wednesday in New Delhi to protest a visit by President Bush.

Surindra Singh Yadav, a senior police officer in charge of crowd control, said as many as 100,000 people, most of them Muslim, had gathered in a fairground in central New Delhi ordinarily used for political rallies.

“Whether Hindu or Muslim, the people of India have gathered here to show our anger. We have only one message _ killer Bush go home,” one of the speakers, Hindu politician Raj Babbar, told the crowd.
washingtonpost.com

Good Nukes, Bad Nukes
Juxtaposed this week are the two poles of the emerging world: India and Iran. They are alpha and omega, the dream and the nightmare. One symbolizes the promise of globalization, the other the threat of global disorder.

What they share, unfortunately, is a passion to be members of the nuclear club. India has nuclear weapons; Iran wants them. Between them stands the United States, trying to set rules that will apply to both — rewarding the good boy while maintaining an ability to punish the bad one.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed that intelligence “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.” That has always seemed to me like an argument for enlightened hypocrisy. And maybe it’s the best explanation for why we should say yes to India’s nukes and no to Iran’s. The two cases are different because — they’re different.
The same rules don’t apply to both; one has shown that it is benign and the other behaves like a global outlaw.

Why India Should Choose Iran, Not the US
Dr Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and one of the leading technical nuclear experts in the United States, believes that even if India gets everything it wants under the US-India civilian nuclear agreement signed by President George W Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on July 18, it would still be only a tiny fraction of the oil and gas it could obtain from Iran to meet India’s growing energy needs.

It is not, Dr Makhijani argues, therefore worth jeopardizing India’s relationship with Iran by voting with the United States against Tehran at the International Atomic Energy Agency.

WASHINGTON – A civil war in Iraq could lead to a broader conflict in the Middle East, pitting the region’s rival Islamic sects against each other, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said in an unusually frank assessment Tuesday.

“If chaos were to descend upon Iraq or the forces of democracy were to be defeated in that country … this would have implications for the rest of the Middle East region and, indeed, the world,” Negroponte said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on global threats.

…Still, he told senators he is seeing progress in the overall political and security situation in Iraq. “And if we continue to make that kind of progress, yes, we can win in Iraq,” he said.

…At the Senate hearing, Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, painted a similarly stark picture of Afghanistan.

While the government has made progress in disarming private militias, Maples said, his agency estimates that violence from the Taliban and other anti-coalition groups in Afghanistan increased 20 percent last year.

“Insurgents now represent a greater threat to the expansion of Afghan government authority than at any point since late 2001, and will be active this spring,” Maples said in his written statement.

…On Venezuela, Negroponte said U.S. intelligence expects President Hugo Chavez to deepen his relationship with Cuban President Fidel Castro and “seek closer economic, military and diplomatic ties with Iran and North Korea.”

Negroponte said the U.S. is concerned about Chavez’s arms purchases, using profits from oil production. “I would say that it’s clear that he is spending hundreds of millions, if not more, for his very extravagant foreign policy” at the expense of the impoverished Venezuelan population, he said.
news.yahoo.com

Two explosions hit Shiite targets in northern Baghdad after sundown Tuesday, killing at least 15 people and raising the day’s death toll from a series of attacks around Baghdad that killed at least 56 and wounded scores, authorities said.

In the latest attacks, police officials said either a car bomb or a mortar hit the Abdel Hadi Chalabi mosque in the Hurriyah neighborhood, killing 14 people and wounding 62.

Mortar fire at the Imam Kadhim shrine in the Kazimiyah neighborhood on the opposite side of the Tigris River killed one and wounded 10.

A Sunni mosque in the Hurriyah neighborhood had been bombed before dawn Tuesday.
abcnews.go.com

Sunnis say they’re mobilizing to combat Shiites, protect mosques
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Sunni Muslims from across central Iraq, alarmed by how easily Shiite Muslim fighters had attacked their mosques during last week’s clashes, said Monday that they were sending weapons to Baghdad and were preparing to dispatch their own fighters to the Iraqi capital in case of further violence.

While no central Sunni group appeared to be coordinating the movement of weapons and people, the widespread claims were seen as the first evidence that Sunnis are organizing to combat Shiite militias, which had mustered thousands of armed men to control many Baghdad neighborhoods after last week’s bombing of one of Shiite Islam’s holiest shrines.

The US and Britain have torn apart Iraq and now they want to do the same to Iran. The US military has been studying ethnic and religious tensions in Iran as part of its preparations for war.

The study was commissioned by the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity (MCIA), which specialises in producing intelligence for low ranking soldiers.

This suggests that plans for war are advanced.

According to the Financial Times, the military wants to determine attitudes towards the central government and examine if Iran is prone to the same tensions that are tearing Iraq apart.

As with the planning for the war in Iraq, the Pentagon has recruited exiles to help with its survey. A similar group of Iraqi exiles told the Bush administration that US soldiers would be welcome when they invaded, and fed them false information about weapons of mass destruction.

The US plans for Iraq involved dividing the country into semi autonomous regions dominated by ethnic groups, and distributing government ministries according to sect. The result has been to drive Iraq towards civil war.

Now the White House has asked the US Congress to make available £43 million to fund a propaganda campaign aimed at Iranians.

Among the exile groups surveyed by the military are the Kurdish Democratic Party, who support the occupation in Iraq, and the followers of the deposed Iranian royal family, who hope a US invasion will restore the monarchy.
socialistworker.co.uk

A sheik from the United Arab Emirates contributed at least $1 million to the Bush Library Foundation, which established the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M University in College Station.

The UAE owns Dubai Port Co., which is taking operations from London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., which operates six U.S. ports. A political uproar has ensued over the deal, which the White House approved without congressional oversight.

The donations were made in the early 1990s for the library, which houses the papers of former President George Bush, the current president’s father.
freenewmexican.com

It’s a family affair…

The US will send an extra 15 diplomats to China, 15 to Latin America and 12 to India as part of a major rethink of its foreign policy for the next few decades.

US embassies in Europe will lose 38 diplomats, including one in Britain, a reflection that the economic, political and religious frontlines have moved elsewhere.

Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, who is accompanying George Bush on a visit to India, Pakistan and Afghanistan that begins today, said in January that hundreds of diplomats would be moved from Europe and Washington to Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
guardian.co.uk

All the better to make mischief with, my dear.

Police fired at prisoners trying to push down a gate at Kabul’s main jail as about 2,000 prisoners resumed rioting yesterday after a 24-hour pause.
One prisoner was killed and three injured, police said.

The fighting restarted after negotiations broke down, said Abdul Halik, a prison police commander. He said authorities had urged prisoners to move into a different wing but they refused. “The prisoners have tried to break down the door to their block and the police opened fire,” Mr Halik said.

Five people have been killed and 41 injured since violence erupted on Saturday.
guardian.co.uk

British forces stay away as Afghan opium war begins
The convoys are formed, line after line, in the swirling dust of Lashkar Gar airfield – bulldozers, oil tankers and trucks bristling with guns. Afghanistan’s opium war is about to begin.

The force to eradicate the poppy fields arrived at the capital of Helmand province from Kabul yesterday, and the programme will be under way in time, it is expected, for the weekend visit of President George Bush.

The policy is emotive and controversial. The poppy crop is the livelihood for many small farmers and their resentment is expect-ed to spark violence.

But Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, a beneficiary of Western largesse, is under pressure from the US and Britain to end his country’s opium production, the biggest in the world and the source of much of the West’s drugs. Helmand, which produces 25 per cent of the crop, has been chosen as a show of his government’s toughness during the US President’s visit.

The prospect of the farmers taking up arms and being joined by a resurgent Taliban and their Islamist allies has led to an eradication operation more military than agricultural in nature.

The debt of foreign countries to Israel stands at USD 23 billion, almost double last year’s debt of USD 12 billion, Bank of Israel data revealed.

According to the Bank’s statistics, the Israeli economy, which until recently only borrowed money from states abroad, has since 2002 turned

into a lender as well, Israel’s leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported Tuesday.

As of today, the world owes the private sector in Israel USD 22.7 billion. The Bank of Israel explained that the Israeli market has attracted investments from abroad during the last year, mainly due to the profitability of the private sector, the reduction in the government’s deficit and the acceleration of privatization processes in the economy.

The improvement in the security situation in the country has also contributed to this rise.
ynetnews.com

More than one in three soldiers and Marines who have served in Iraq later sought help for mental health problems, according to a comprehensive snapshot by Army experts of the psyches of men and women returning from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places.

The accounts of more than 300,000 soldiers and Marines returning from several theaters paint an unusually detailed picture of the psychological impact of the various conflicts. Those returning from Iraq consistently reported more psychic distress than those returning from Afghanistan and other conflicts, such as those in Bosnia or Kosovo.

Iraq veterans are far more likely to have witnessed people getting wounded or killed, to have experienced combat, and to have had aggressive or suicidal thoughts, the Army report said. Nearly twice as many of those returning from Iraq reported having a mental health problem — or were hospitalized for a psychiatric disorder — compared with troops returning from Afghanistan.
washingtonpost.com