Author Archives: Effendi

Karzai abandons talks with Taliban

By Effendi | Published: October 2, 2011

Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, supported engagement and negotiations with the Taliban for years. Not anymore:

KABUL – President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who for years pushed for reconciliation with the Taliban, now says attempts to negotiate with the insurgent movement are futile and efforts at dialogue should focus instead on neighboring Pakistan.

Karzai explained in a videotaped speech released by his office yesterday that he changed his views about trying to talk to the Taliban after a suicide bomber, claiming to be a peace emissary sent by the insurgents, killed a former Afghan president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, at his home on Sept. 20. Rabbani was leading Karzai’s effort to broker peace with the Taliban.

“Their messengers are coming and killing. . . . So with whom should we make peace?” Karzai said Friday to a gathering of the nation’s top religious leaders that was videotaped.

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Posted in Farce, Terrorism | Leave a comment

Pakistan’s Neo-Colonial Rule in Balochistan

By Effendi | Published: September 30, 2011

Pakistan hasn’t had to answer to a UN Security Council resolution since 1948.

Yet in the last 60 years Pakistan has conducted campaigns of military annexation & occupation – as well economic exploitation, ethnic persecution & cultural subjugation in the region of Balochistan with impunity.

4,000 Baloch people arrested & disappeared, 3,000 Baloch killed & 200,000 displaced. Torture and air strikes on civilians is routine.

Peter Tatchell has been highlighting the systematic persecution of Balochis in Pakistan:

The cultural conquest of Balochistan also involves the radical Islamification of the traditionally more secular Baloch nation. Large numbers of religious schools have been funded by Islamabad, with a view to imposing Pakistan’s harsher, more narrow-minded interpretation of Islam. This is fuelling fundamentalism.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Anwar al-Awlaki killed in Yemen

By Effendi | Published: September 30, 2011

Anwar al-Awlaki has been killed in Yemen. Reports have now been corroborated by the BBC.

When he was imam of a San Diego mosque in the 1990s, his sermons were attended by two future 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.

In a video posted in November last year he called for the killing of Americans, saying they were from the “party of devils”.

Kool and the Gang are overjoyed:

Ordinary people (and potential victims of al-Qaeda terrorism) express their relief all over the world:

“The victory belongs to those peasants. Not to us.”

Posted in Terrorism | 5 Comments

When The Onion becomes real news

By Effendi | Published: September 30, 2011

Does the Onion imitate real news? As in this hilarious spoof:

Or does real news imitate The Onion?

Al-Qaida has sent a message to the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asking him to stop spreading conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks.

Iranian media on Wednesday reported quotes from what appears to be an article published in the latest issue of the al-Qaida English language magazine, Inspire, which described Ahmadinejad’s remarks over the 11 September attacks as “ridiculous”.

In his UN general assembly speech last week, Ahmadinejad cast doubt over the official version of the 2001 attacks.

“The Iranian government has professed on the tongue of its president Ahmadinejad that it does not believe that al-Qaida was behind 9/11 but rather, the US government,” the article said, according to Iranian media. “So we may ask the question: why would Iran ascribe to such a ridiculous belief that stands in the face of all logic and evidence?”

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Posted in Conspiracy Theory Madness, Terrorism | Leave a comment

Iranian Pastor to be hung for being Christian

By Effendi | Published: September 28, 2011

Only this week we discussed the appalling human rights abuses and denial of religious freedom for Christians in Pakistan. In Iran things are diabolically worse.

David Allen Green reports in the New Statesman that Iran plans to hang the Christian Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani for apostasy. He was arrested for questioning the state monopoly of the use of Islam for the religious instruction of children. But after his arrest the terms of his case became progressively worse and he will now be hanged because “the court has decided that he remains guilty of apostasy because he has Muslim ancestry”. He has appeared in court three times this week and each time has refused to renounce his faith when asked to do so by the court.

Please take a moment to write a letter to the Iranian embassy asking them to not execute Yousef Nadarkhani for, quite simply, being a Christian. It will take 5 minutes at the most.

Posted in Freedom of Religion, Sharia | 1 Comment

“Barely A Token Gesture”

By Effendi | Published: September 27, 2011

In Saudi Arabia women’s ‘rights’ are a favour granted by the King. Over the weekend, King Abdullah granted Saudi women the right to vote in local elections. Not straight away but in 2015. If you’re a hundred or so years out of step with the rest of humanity, what’s another 4 years?

In the Guardian, Nesrine Malik is wary of the pronouncement since similar assurances have been made in the past but have never been implemented because of inertia at beauracratic level.

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Posted in Human Rights | Leave a comment

The “CIA Created the Al-Qaeda” Myth

By Effendi | Published: September 27, 2011

It wasn’t Pakistan but the CIA that created the savage Haqqani Taliban network that U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen has been belatedly fingering as the chief culprit in Afghanistan’s agonies, Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s Interior Minister, declared on Sunday. It is an outrageous lie, as anyone even vaguely familiar with the terrorist savageries visited upon the people of South Asia over the past three decades will know. But I don’t expect that this will matter in the least to fashionable “left-wing” opinion among the world’s rich white people, where the consensus has for some long while served with remarkable precision as an echo of the lumpen view incited by right-wing Pakistani chauvinists.

Terry Glavin offers an insight into the history of the Haqqani Network, that Taliban stronghold in Pakistan, nurtured and funded by Pakistan’s secret police, the ISI.

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Posted in Islamism, Terrorism | 3 Comments

Girl accused of blasphemy for a spelling error

By Effendi | Published: September 25, 2011

Next time some Islamist (or their fellow travellers) attempt to re-purpose Islamophobia in Europe to their political advantage, ask them if conditions for Muslims in Europe is anywhere near as dangerous and difficult as it is for Christians living in Pakistan.

Consider this depressing story of a 13 year old girl who was expelled from school and whose mother transferred to another city after making a “blasphemous” spelling mistake on her exam paper.

On Thursday, Faryal’s Urdu teacher was collecting the answer sheets from her students when she noticed the apparently offensive word on her pupil’s sheet. The teacher, Fareeda Bibi, reportedly summoned the Christian girl, scolded her and beat her. Her punishment, however, did not end here. When Faryal’s class fellows learnt of the alleged blasphemy, the teacher brought the principal’s notice to the matter, who further informed the school management.

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Posted in Freedom of Religion | 1 Comment

Flying Blind: Waiting for a Real Reckoning on 1971

By Effendi | Published: September 25, 2011

Now that new developments in Pakistan show that the ISI is interwoven with the Taliban’s Haqqani Network, it is becoming increasingly difficult for right-wing interests in the US and their paid hacks to whitewash Pakistan’s history of genocide in order to rehabilitate it out of its status as a failed state.

By ‘paid hacks’ we are referring here to the “journalist/academic” Sarmila Bose whose efforts to rewrite the history of the 1971 War of Independence have been tainted by a blatant and barely disguised bias. Her telling of the events is not the neutral reappraisal of the abuses of both sides that it is touted to be but a selective revision to absolve the Pakistan military of its crimes against humanity.

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Posted in 1971 War | 4 Comments

Pakistan ISI Caught Red Handed

By Effendi | Published: September 25, 2011

The Haqqani Network is a Taliban wing  based in Pakistan. Last week it was responsible for the terrorist attack on an NATO installation in Kabul. Sixteen people were killed – no Americans.

Now irrefutable mobile intercept evidence has been traced which shows the direct link between Haqqani network and the ISI.

According to U.S. officials, the Haqqani network consists of several thousand fighters and operates with impunity from safe havens inside Pakistan, conducting cross-border raids into Afghanistan and up into Kabul.

The Pakistani spy agency uses the Haqqanis to sow violence so Afghanistan cannot emerge as a strong and stable country allied with Pakistan’s arch enemy India.

Two days before the attack on the U.S. Embassy, a large truck bomb went off at an American combat outpost, wounding 77 U.S. soldiers.

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