Our war, through their eyes, is not a pretty picture. As they see it, war with Iraq weakens the United States and strengthens a mutual enemy — Muslim fundamentalists.

A small delegation of female journalists and media professionals from Morocco visited Boston to “break the ice between the United States and Muslim countries,” as they explained in French, through a translator.

When the discussion turned to war in Iraq, their message was loud and clear, in French or English.

“C’est une catastrophe,” said Hinde Taarji, a journalist and author of several books, including one about women and Islam.

“C’est terrible,” said Maria Latifi, director of an educational television station in Morocco.

The other Muslim women echoed those sentiments.

They came to the United States, first, to get the word out that not all Muslim women are swathed in veils and burkas, living lives of oppression and misery. Their larger mission is to fight on behalf of those who still struggle.

To that end, they seek a longstanding weapon of mass influence: U.S. moral authority. Yet, to them, that sharp and precious tool is dulled by U.S. policy in Iraq.

Didn’t they and other progressive Muslims see the proudly purple fingers of voters in Iraq?

No, said Latifi. They “went completely unnoticed.” People see “the mayhem … the sectarian war. They see a country sinking.”

And, as she pointed out, they see it every day, as the United States does, via CNN.

Because of the negative perception in the Muslim world of what is happening in Iraq, the women believe hard-line religious fundamentalists are gaining strength.

Bahia Amrani, founder and publisher of a newsweekly magazine, Le Reporter, said the United States does not understand that democracy cannot be secured through force. Before people can fight for freedom on their own behalf, she said, “There has to be a fight against illiteracy, poverty, exclusion.”
seattlepi.nwsource.com

UN nuclear chief Mohamed ElBaradei has welcomed the move by the UN Security Council to hold off imposing sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programme.

“The only solution to the Iran situation is a comprehensive package through dialogue, through negotiation,” Mr ElBaradei said.

The US had said earlier this week that pursuit of a tough UN Security Council resolution on Iran would be delayed.

Tehran has so far ignored calls from the UN to suspend uranium enrichment.

“It is very good that the [UN] Security Council holds its horses,” Mr ElBaradei said at a news conference in Amsterdam.

“I am very optimistic. I hope both sides will move away from the war of words. I hope the pitch will go down… we need compromises on both sides,” the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) added.
bbc.co.uk

ÒThe US administration considers making attacks on Iran through AzerbaijanÕs territory,Ó said Scott Ritter, former UN Weapons Inspector stated (APA).

Ritter said that it is enough to look through military maps, if one wants to realize how important it is for the United States to dislocate its military forces in Azerbaijan.

ÒAmerica is taking interest in dislocating its forces in Azerbaijan, neighbor of Iran. The shortest way to Tehran passes through the Caspian Sea. The US forces plans to make attacks this territory namely,Ó Ritter underlined.

The former UN Arms Inspector also said that the militants have the power to carry out these operations and intends to fulfill this plan.

ÒThey have received a special order by the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. No one can doubt of US President, his close surroundings and military men are preparing for war with Iran,Ó Ritter reported.
en.apa.az

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is due to leave for Washington in two weeks-time and hold a summit with American President George W. Bush. The two leaders are set to meet in a bid to formulate a uniform stance on the Iranian nuclear threat and Hamas’ rule in the Palestinian Authority. The PM will also attempt to ascertain the Administration’s standpoint on the issue of the planned Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.

On Wednesday Olmert convened Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and senior defense officials to discuss the US visit.

The PM is scheduled to stay in the American capital for four days. On the second day of his trip Olmert will meet Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. On the third day, May 23, the PM will meet President Bush at the White House. The day following his meeting with the president, Olmert is set to speak before the two Houses of Congress.

Diplomatic officials in Jerusalem stressed that the main purpose of the visit is to hold an introduction between Olmert and the senior American officials, and to confirm both countries see eye to eye on several issues.

Olmert will also seek to emphasize during the visit the need for international action against the Iranian nuclear plan and the Hamas government, which threaten the region. Olmert will point to the link between the two subjects.
ynetnews.com

The largest university and college lecturers union in Britain is likely to decide shortly to recommend that its 67,000 members boycott Israeli lecturers and academic institutions that do not publicly declare their opposition to Israeli policy in the territories.

The boycott motion, which was drafted by the southeast region of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), will be brought to a vote at its annual national conference, which will be held May 27-29. It comes about a year after the last boycott by British lecturers.
haaretz.com

At a time when tens of millions of workers are struggling to pay for gas for their car, electricity for their home, and medical care for their families, the Republicans have stepped forward with a plan to help. They want to give another $20 to $30 billion in tax cuts to the rich.

This temporary assistance to the needy rich (TANR) takes the form of a 2-year extension of a tax cut that made the maximum tax rate on stock dividends and capital gain income 15 percent. While tens of millions of ordinary workers pay income tax rates of 25 percent on their wages, the Republicans argue that Bill Gates and his billionaire friends shouldn’t have to pay taxes at more than a 15 percent rate. Most of this tax break goes to the richest 1 percent of the population. This is because they hold most of the country’s stock and even when middle income people hold stock, it is usually in retirement accounts, which are not affected by this tax cut.
tompaine.com

The Bush administration has secretly been collecting the domestic telephone records of millions of U.S. households and businesses, assembling gargantuan databases and attempting to sift through them for clues about terrorist threats, according to sources with knowledge of the program.

The “call detail records” enable U.S. intelligence agencies to track who calls whom, and when, but do not include the contents of conversations, the sources said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program. The companies cooperating with the National Security Agency dominate the U.S. telecommunications market and connect hundreds of billions of telephone calls each year. Intelligence analysts are seeking to mine their records to expose hidden connections and details of social networks, hoping to find signs of terrorist plots in the vast sea of innocent contacts.
washingtonpost.com

…George Orwell’s “thoughtcrime”–the equating of mental disloyalty with actual sedition–has gone mainstream. Media discussion about the recent trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, accused of possibly maybe thinking about becoming the “20th hijacker” on 9/11–or was it the second 20th hijacker?–spanned a vast spectrum of acceptable political discourse. The “conservatives” demanded that Moussaoui be executed, the “liberals” that he be sentenced to life in prison. Nowhere in the press or on the air could anyone be found who was willing to ask the most obvious question:

Why was the guy on trial at all?
news.yahoo.com

A measure of the effectiveness of U.S. propaganda during the World Wars is the enduring popular view that the German people are by nature submissive to authority, or worse, bent on aggression. At the lowest level, the disinformation campaign deployed the Argumentum ad Odium in widely distributed posters featuring Teutonic brutes red in tooth and claw. Only slightly more sophisticated were literary caricatures such as this one by best-selling author William Shirer in his Berlin Diary:

It must also be noted down that Hitler’s frenzy for bloody conquest is by no means exclusive to him in Germany. The urge to expansion, the hunger for land and space, for what Germans call Lebensraum, has lain long in the soul of the people.

This program of demonization pushed any inconvenient facts from the popular consciousness (and, of course, made the fire-bombing of German cities a bit more palatable). Thus today few Americans know of the nearly successful July 20 Plot of 1944 by Colonel Stauffenberg and other German officers to assassinate Hitler. Still fewer know of German student and youth opposition to the war and the Nazi regime.
lewrockwel.com

AMMAN, JORDAN ? The three middle-aged men sitting in an Indian restaurant in Jordan’s capital scarcely look like Islamic revolutionaries. They are smartly dressed in Western-style suits and sip thoughtfully from cans of Pepsi as they share their plan to reshape the Muslim world.

“[President] Bush says that we want to enslave people and oppress their freedom of speech,” says Abu Abdullah, a senior member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Party of Liberation. “But we want to free all people from being slaves of men and make them slaves of Allah.”

Hizb ut-Tahrir says that Muslims should abolish national boundaries within the Islamic world and return to a single Islamic state, known as “the Caliphate,” that would stretch from Indonesia to Morocco and contain more than 1.5 billion people.

It’s a simple and seductive idea that analysts believe may someday allow the group to rival existing Islamic movements, topple the rulers of Middle Eastern nations, and undermine those seeking to reconcile democracy and Islam and build bridges between East and West.
csmonitor.com

Sowing the seeds for global war. The epic CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS: coming to your theater. Soon.