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Roit Riot every where by the moslems throughout the world...... because Newsweek mistakenly reported that an American soldier flushed the satanic verses [Quaran] in the tiolet at Guantamela bay during interrogation. I ask again is islam a peaceful religion.
I have a confession to make. I have flushed one page of the Quaran in a tiolet and there was no riot. Moslems have publicly set fire on the Bible and sentenced to death moslem converts to christianity, yet no riot. Many Christians have been killed maliciously by the moslems and no riot. Is it about islam or something else?
Hail Biafra
Posts: 1673 | From: Minnesota USA | Registered: Mar 2001
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The Newsweek apology is a political ruse sponsored by Washington, i.e. the Pentagon. Washington did not really disprove the report. The riots will continue to spread until the occupiers are expelled from those lands. That is how people respond when their land is illegally occupied. The Arabs are not Biafrans.
Posts: 449 | Registered: Mar 2001
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How come a religion of peace promotes such violence against its own people?
How many people will die before people like you will know that Islam is a very violent retrogressive religion? If people like you who claim to be educated will think and write like this, is there any wonder that illitrates and extremist think and act the way they do?
I am yet to see a suicide bomber who comes from amongst the elites.
What type of bondage is that will make people kill each other because a paper was flushed down the drain. This same stupid mentality was what led to the death of an Igbo man in Northern Nigeria when he was accused of using the koran to wipe his ass.
So the paper is where the god of the koran is , not i the implementation of what is written.
I pity those of u who are decieved. On the day of judgement, you life style and how u treat ur fellow human will be used to judge u not on what book of religions u defended or studied. Without Christ, and his manifestation in ur life, it will all be vanity!
Posts: 380 | From: US | Registered: Dec 2004
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Something that was founded by a sex starved con man can never be peaceful. The evidence is all over the trash they pray with and each time I say this, instead of contradicting my well fortified position, all they could muster is more noisy nonsense without informing us what part of their “satanic verses” is misrepresented. At least Biafra did not fight a one month war. The speed with which Iraq and Afghanistan fell was equal to that with which Jordan, Syria and Egypt all "arab" nations fell to the great Israel. Few Hours warfare to them is great accomplishment. Since when if I may ask did riot become comparable to the real deal, war?
___________________ BIAFRA: The land of my ancestors now, yesterday and always. So it will be! Posts: 2482 | From: Ala Igbo | Registered: Apr 2004
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The excerpted is from a protégé (alike in their thinking) of Col Abubakar Umar. A scholarly authority from the northern part whose objective is to see a sound and decent nation where rule of law is nourished, folks hear Mr. Lamido Sanusi.
quote:Thinking Aloud: How Not To Debate The Shari’ah
…Shari’ah could be a tool for improving honesty and transparency in the management of resources, spreading literacy and education, forcing through more equitable distribution of income, reforming personal law to redress injustice against women (such as rights to maintenance, protection from arbitrary repudiation, equity among wives in polygamy, rights to child custody and maintenance, minimum age for marriage, protection against domestic violence) etc Instead, at least early on, it seemed that the real focus was the implementation of punishments in criminal law, almost exclusively on the poor and women, to the detriment of these other laudable objectives. Secondly, it seemed that the interpretation of the law was such that it would not achieve some of its objectives.
To give one example, in the state of Zamfara, a seventeen year-old village girl, Bariya Magazu, who was found pregnant before marriage was given 100 lashes of the cane for the crime of fornication. The girl had named three grown men who had sexually exploited her but all of them were acquitted because she had no witnesses and none of them confessed. No attempt was made to obtain circumstantial evidence in the form of scientific tests to establish the paternity of the child, even though Muslim law from the classical period has always admitted such evidence in the absence of direct proof. An example is the acceptance of the smell of alcohol in the breath of a suspect as proof of imbibing the substance and, more controversially, the acceptance by Malikites of pregnancy as proof of fornication as in Ms Magazu’s case, even though pregnancy proves neither penetration nor consent. Similar criticism followed the amputation of the hand of a village man who stole a goat. Here the argument from Islamic sources was based on a view that this punishment is only allowed in a state that had provided social welfare for its citizens, and that where large income distribution inequalities are the norm along with widespread poverty, other forms of punishment should obtain. More important is the fact that a law that punishes a teenager who was exploited by paedophiles and left with the burden of an unwanted pregnancy, while acquitting the real perpetrators of the crime is clearly immoral. If this is acknowledged, then it cannot be the law of God….
Don’t I know this already?
___________________ BIAFRA: The land of my ancestors now, yesterday and always. So it will be! Posts: 2482 | From: Ala Igbo | Registered: Apr 2004
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Mazi Waypoint1Biafra. Answer to your question is iSlamic a peaceful religion???. The answer is that iSLam is never a religion, not to talk or it being peaceful or not.
iSLamic is never a geligion but a WICKED SECRET CULT. A cult that has only fugitive sect and CUR as its followers.
Which want those mobs or its follower to believe that only their CROOK- DOGFATHERz " leaderz" if you like call them IMAM or whatever will make their thinking for them.
Let one of us ans this question. When a CROOK and VAMPIRE, become a leader of a WICKED SECRET CULT. What do you expect from their followerz???.
WARNING to all those MOBz: I mean those iSLamic EXTREMIST, that there is no pleasure in killing innocent people, and untill all those FUGITIVE CULPRIT and CUR, were killed or captured. You will never have peace.
___________________ Hustler by nature criminal by LAW. It is heart wrenching that in today oNe niGERia MURDERERS and CRIMINALS are seen as HEROES. Posts: 7 | From: Tokyo Japan | Registered: May 2005
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Remember Benjamin Adekunle,Bushman Obasanjo,T Y Danjuma,LUCIFER Awolowo,evil Gowon and your own Azikiwe and some of the nigeria army officers and sabo's in our mist are all christains and they slaughtered innocent igbo civilians in the 60's how about that. Islam is evil religion there is no two ways about that, but i wished the BIAFRANS COULD BACK TO THE RELIGION OF OUR FOREFATHERS HAD. I am a christain but my christianity stops when ever i stepped out of BIAFRAN LAND until i checked out the environment i am in because i never ever turn the other cheek that is the problem of christains of our generation. Have we the young generation of Biafrans asked our selves why our forefathers were able to stop the advancement of islamic religion in BIAFRA SOIL THOSE ARE MY HEROES. The so called evil empire britain was a christain nation still they backed the islamic north during the nigeria civil war to kill their fellow christains. Bear in mind religion is politics it depends on who it favours . I wished we the biafrans could temporarily adhere to karl marx idiom, just temporarily, if you want to develope a nation forget about religion.
Posts: 45 | Registered: Sep 2004
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We know that they are loose screws of Arab decent backed and funded by the desert rats. We know that they come from primarily moslem countries. But we now know that they no longer come from Arab countries as originally identified.They now come in different shades of skin colors, nationalities,they will even come as a tea drinking native English gentleman, a hicky from the Great Plains of Kentucky,upper middle class and well educated.However, they will always retain one disticntive quality that makes them viable candidates for death wish, a commonality that is encryptd by Mohammed; it is a common denominator shared and not spared by anyone -----> ISLAM . The profile of a moslem terrorist will continue to amaze us.
A Jamaican recently converted to Islam, over whelmed by the verses of the quaran as satanic and devilicious was one of the terrorist in London.We ask again Is lslam about peace or about death?
Hail Biafra
[ July 15, 2005, 04:34 PM: Message edited by: Waypoint1Biafra ]
Posts: 1673 | From: Minnesota USA | Registered: Mar 2001
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British Prime Minister, Tony Blair has said it is time to stand up to the "evil ideology" behind the London bombings and other attacks. According to him, such violence was not in response to any particular policy or founded in any injustice, but in a "fanaticism" that had to be confronted. Some Labour MPs, including ex-minister Clare Short, said they had "no doubt" the attacks were linked to Iraq. Meanwhile, police have raided another house in Beeston, Leeds, near the home of London bomber Shehzad Tanweer. The bomb attacks killed 51 people and injured hundreds more. The four bombers are also thought to have died. “If it is Iraq that motivates them, why is the same ideology killing Iraqis by terror in defiance of an elected Iraqi government?”, he queried. Speaking to Labour party members in London, the prime minister said it would be a "misunderstanding of a catastrophic order" to think that if the developed world changed its behaviour, extremists would change theirs. "If it is the plight of the Palestinians that drives them, why, every time it looks as if Israel and Palestine are making progress, does the same ideology perpetrate an outrage that turns hope back into despair? "If it is Afghanistan that motivates them, why blow up innocent Afghans on their way to their first-ever election? "If it is Iraq that motivates them, why is the same ideology killing Iraqis by terror in defiance of an elected Iraqi government? "What was 11 September 2001 the reprisal for?" But some Labour left-wingers said there was a link between the Iraq war and the attacks. John McDonnell, Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington, said it was "intellectually unsustainable" to say the war in Iraq had not motivated the bombers. The identity of the four bombers was shown on BBC website yesterday. Mohammad Sidique Khan: Aged 30, from Beeston, Leeds, recently moved to Dewsbury, married with baby. ID found at Edgware Road blast site. Hasib Mir Hussain (confirmed): Aged 18, lived Holbeck, Leeds. Reported missing on day of bombings. Said to have turned very religious two years ago. ID found in No 30 bus. Shehzad Tanweer (confirmed; above): Aged 22, born Bradford, lived Beeston, Leeds. Studied religion in Pakistan. Forensic evidence linking him to Aldgate blast. Lindsey Germaine: Jamaican-born man who lived in Buckinghamshire. "For as long as Britain remains in occupation of Iraq the terrorist recruiters will have the argument they seek to attract more susceptible young recruits to the bomb team. Britain must withdraw now." And in an interview for GMTV's Sunday programme, Labour ex-minister Clare Short, who resigned over the Iraq war, said she "had no doubt" the atrocities were linked to Iraq. "We are implicit in the slaughter of large numbers of civilians in Iraq and supporting a Middle East policy that for the Palestinians creates this sense of double standards - that feeds anger," she said. Earlier on Saturday, the family of one of the bombers said he may have been "brainwashed" into carrying it out. In a statement, they described 30-year-old teacher Mohammad Sidique Khan as "a kind and caring member of our family" and appealed to the public for information. The family of another of the bombers, 18-year-old Hasib Hussain, have also expressed their "devastation" at events. British police have turned their attention to finding those who may have helped the bombers carry out last Thursday's attacks. Officers are searching a house in Leeds linked to Egyptian biochemist Magdi Mahmoud al-Nashar, who has been arrested in Cairo. Egypt's interior minister said press reports linking Mr al-Nashar to al-Qaeda were "groundless" and based on a hasty conclusion. Three of the bombers were from West Yorkshire - Hussain, from Holbeck in Leeds; Khan, from Dewsbury, and Tanweer, 22, of Beeston, Leeds, and police are searching their homes. Mutual respect between religions is the way forward, which can only be ascertained by allaying fears and listening to the concerns of local people They are also searching the home of the man they believe is the fourth bomber - Lindsey Germaine, a Jamaican-born man who lived in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. The wreckage of the number 30 bus, which had its roof ripped off in the blast that killed 13 in Tavistock Square, was taken away for further forensic examination on Saturday. On Friday Britain's top Muslims issued a joint statement of condemnation branding the London bombings "utterly criminal, totally reprehensible, and absolutely un-Islamic". But Britain's highest ranking Asian police officer, Tarique Ghaffur, said Muslims and their leaders must do more than just condemn the bombings. Mr Ghaffur, the Metropo-litan Police Assistant Commissioner, urged members of the community to inform on potential terrorists and their supporters. The police would have to engage better with minorities - but the minorities would have to take the first step, he said. – Thisdayonline 7/18/05
Goodevening oooo! to you Blair and welcome to what some of us have known and expressed while you folks played the PC – Political Correct thing. Bombers’ ideology evil, said he. What is the ideology in this case? ISLAM of course and will remain so unless something drastic like denying them the freedom to preach and practice reckless rubbish in any western hemisphere is established! The so-called extremists are the true-practitioners of this cult as Blair and Bush should know by now. The ones they refer to as “moderates” to me are wimps who do not have the nerves to publicly embrace what their brothers in crime are doing although they too share the same beliefs hence no meaningful condemnation is heard from them each time these fools kill the innocents.
___________________ BIAFRA: The land of my ancestors now, yesterday and always. So it will be! Posts: 2482 | From: Ala Igbo | Registered: Apr 2004
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It would be funny if it were not true, but we all, without equivocation, understand the length to which the Muslims(not the politically correct ISLAMIC DEVIANTS ) will go in order to debase the essence of humanhood. What every writer forget to deal with is that the West is giving these crooks a reason to justify their evil actions and more important, a platform to preach and practise their ideology. A situation where 10% of the French population is Muslim cannot be said to be right in any sense of the word. These arabs only understand theocracy, brutal warlordism, autocracy, and the caste system; when a Western ideologue wakes up and start to preach Democracy, equal representation, and one man one voice in the deadlocked land of sharia, quoran, and Mohammedism, it is akin to attempting to convert the Chinese to English speakers. Let the world leave these guys to their own lifestyles of Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, suicide bombing, ignorance, zombieism, and unadulterated stone age mentality. Let the world look on as they butcher themselves in the name of Islam, let the world ignore them to their wahabism, let the world turn a blind eye to their manic zeal for murderous endeavors. But make no mistake, these people are a special people who would rather live under a Saddam Hussein than in a democracy, and until the world knows to leave them alone albeit occasionally throwing them the crumbs from the fruit of our biblical enterprise; Until then, they will revel in the mistaken belief that they do matter to the rest of the world.
___________________ To rid ourselves of all of those other "isms"--racism, classism, ageism, etc.--it is sexism that must first be eradicated.."The Gender Question" Posts: 28 | From: Irvine, California | Registered: Jun 2005
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quote: A situation where 10% of the French population is Muslim cannot be said to be right in any sense of the word. - L`avenment
In the same way it cannot said to be right for christians to be forced to live together in an abomination called nigeria with 40 or 50% muslim population. They are now forcing their sharia law on us. Just go to persecution.org for recent reports on exactly how peacefull and tolerant Islam has been in nigeria.
___________________ Biafra is inevitable.Illegitimis nil carborundum. Posts: 760 | From: europe | Registered: Jan 2005
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I'm always for human rights, but if ever segregation was justified, it is in the case of muslims. As L'avenement said, let them kill each other instead of us...the world will be a better place as a result. Let them fill hell with themselves to overflowing because it's impossible to reason with them. No one can say that the world didn't try to engage them. Let their blood be on their own heads.
___________________ The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves... Posts: 660 | From: Valle del Sol | Registered: Nov 2004
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The Sharia Supreme Council of Nigeria opposes any form of Child Right Act to protect children from abuse and maltreatment that includes, sexual abuse of young children under the age of 18 because Islam protects freaks and pedophilia.
Hail Biafra
Posts: 1673 | From: Minnesota USA | Registered: Mar 2001
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Nigeria extends religious law Buses, taxis to be segregated by gender in state of Kano By Craig Timberg The Washington Post Updated: 1:25 a.m. ET Aug. 23, 2005
KANO, Nigeria - For women, commuting across this ancient Islamic city has long been as easy as hopping into a minibus or climbing on the back of a motorcycle taxi. Both are cheap and readily available. Even if some female passengers found it unsettling to be so near strange men, who might make lewd comments or press their bodies close, such was the price of efficient transport.
But the days of casual travel are ending for the women of Kano, a bustling trading center of about 500,000 in northern Nigeria. Government officials, determined to halt what they see as the decline of public morality, are banning women from all but a handful of Kano's motorcycle taxis and the front sections of public minibuses.
It is the next logical step, officials said, in their effort to bring the strict Islamic legal code, or sharia, to Kano, which is in one of 12 states in northern Nigeria where Islamic law holds sway to varying degrees. The remaining 24 states, and the federal capital, Abuja, , have a mix of religions and are governed by secular laws.
Since 2000, authorities across northern Nigeria have sought to reestablish traditional sharia rules disrupted in the 20th century by British colonialism and post-colonial political struggles , including floggings for drinking alcohol, amputations of hands for stealing and death by stoning for adultery. The harshest of these penalties have rarely been carried out, but a broader campaign toward regulating behavior -- especially in relations between men and women -- has taken hold. Underlying the move toward sharia is a growing concern that life is changing too fast in Kano. Traders hawk DVDs of often-lewd Hollywood movies. Residents who can afford satellite television can get an eyeful of dancing, scantily dressed women. And some young women are choosing not to wear the traditional head coverings or long, loosely fitting robes worn by their elders.
The new transit strategy, for which the government has bought a small fleet of gender-restricted vehicles, has met initially with widespread approval. Men say they believe the virtue of women is better protected when the sexes sit separately. Women say the new minibuses are more comfortable and private. Sitting in the back, they say, frees them from the potentially amorous gazes of men sitting behind.
Zabbaatu Auwal, a woman carrying a toddler, boarded one of the new minibuses at a hectic, smoggy depot. The vehicle was emblazoned with the words "A Daidaita Sahu" or "Be Orderly," in Hausa , one of the four most widely used local languages beside English. Taking a seat in the back row, she praised the new system.
Fewer choices "I don't have to mix with men, which is a source of discomfort to us," explained Auwal, 27, as she held her 2-year-old son.
However, the second phase of the transportation policy, which will include the ban on women riding motorcycle taxis, threatens to be far less popular. In the next few weeks, police will begin fining motorcycle drivers caught carrying women who are not their relatives. Drivers licenses also may be suspended. And gender-based seating restrictions will extend to all commercial minibuses, even those that are privately owned.
That will leave women with far fewer choices for getting to work or school or going shopping. If the seats designated for women on a minibus are full, they will have to wait for the next bus or one of the new single-sex vehicles. The government has purchased 176 motorcycles and 500 three-wheeled vehicles with covered seating areas that are physically separated from the driver. Together, though, they represent a fraction of the tens of thousands of public transport vehicles that ply Kano's streets.
This is a dense, fast-paced city, with a centuries-old historic quarter whose narrow streets are not accessible to minibuses. Aisha Lawal, a 19-year-old student, said she will have difficulty making her twice-weekly visits to see her grandparents if the vast majority of motorcycle taxis are prohibited from carrying her. She predicted resistance from women.
On a sidewalk a few blocks away, Miriam Muhammed, 24, prepared to climb onto a motorcycle taxi. "We don't want this," she said of the new system. "Goodness, I'll be frustrated."
Many men argue that the new rules were brought on by Kano's chaotic traffic. The motorcycle taxis, which are noisy and spew streams of bluish exhaust, whip in and out of preposterously small pockets between moving cars.
The Hausa word for a motorcycle taxi is achaba , meaning "to make a silly mistake." Serious injuries among drivers have become so common in recent years that the city's biggest public hospital has an area known as the "achaba ward."
But it is the contact between a man and woman -- there is no way to ride on an achaba without legs and torsos touching -- that makes them particularly alarming to this traditional community. Polygamy is common here, but sexual contact outside marriage, or even the rumor of it, can generate tremendous shame and condemnation, not just for a woman but for her family as well.
Sule Yau Sule, a senior government spokesman in Kano, said some of the motorcycle drivers pick up women for the thrill of feeling them sitting close behind.
‘Wish of the people’ Avoiding such problems in the future, he said, is worth the investment, even in a place with a sagging economy and a dangerously overloaded road system. So far, the government has spent about $2.1 million on the gender-restricted vehicles, which are leased to private drivers, and it plans to buy many more.
"It's the wish of the people," Sule said. "This is part of sharia."
The implementation of sharia has run into practical problems before, and throughout the north, few of the most serious penalties have been carried out. Nobody has been stoned to death for adultery. An initial spate of amputations for stealing stopped after three were performed, and most criminal cases are now directed to state criminal courts.
The sharia courts increasingly deal with marital matters, civil disputes and public drinking, an offense that typically is punished by lashes intended more to shame than to physically harm.
The "Be Orderly" slogan found on the new buses is from a broader campaign initiated by Kano's Gov. Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau. He warned on the program's Web site that "rules of behavior, civility and decency, which the people of Kano were renowned for, are on the decline."
Some men on crowded minibuses seem willing to make propositions they wouldn't have dared a few years ago, women passengers said.
‘Rub themselves against you’ "You can sit by a man who is not disciplined in his own mind," said Fatima Abdulkadir, 45. "They say things, or you see men trying to move toward you, trying to rub themselves against you, which is not permitted."
The new buses and three-wheeled vehicles may gradually eliminate that problem, but not the new motorcycles. Though they are restricted to carrying only women, the drivers will continue to be men, and their female passengers will continue to encounter a degree of physical contact widely regarded here as inappropriate.
One obvious solution -- hiring women drivers -- runs into another sensitive gender issue. Every bus, every motorcycle and the vast majority of private cars in Kano are driven by men. Few expect that to change.
For jihadist, read anarchist Aug 18th 2005 From The Economist print edition
BOMBS, beards and backpacks: these are the distinguishing marks, at least in the popular imagination, of the terror-mongers who either incite or carry out the explosions that periodically rock the cities of the western world. A century or so ago it was not so different: bombs, beards and fizzing fuses. The worries generated by the two waves of terror, the responses to them and some of their other characteristics are also similar. The spasm of anarchist violence that was at its most convulsive in the 1880s and 1890s was felt, if indirectly, in every continent. It claimed hundreds of lives, including those of several heads of government, aroused widespread fear and prompted quantities of new laws and restrictions. But it passed. Jihadism is certainly not a lineal descendant of anarchism: far from it. Even so, the parallels between the anarchist bombings of the 19th century and the Islamist ones of today may be instructive.
Islamists, or at least those of the Osama bin Laden stripe, have several aims. Some—such as the desire “to regain Palestine”, to avenge the killing of “our nation's sons” and to expel all “infidel armies” from “the land of Muhammad”—could be those of any conventional national-liberation movement. Others are more millenarian: to bring everyone to Islam, which, says Mr bin Laden, “is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and persecuted.” All this will come to pass once everyone is living in an Islamic state, a caliphate governed by sharia law. Hence “the martyrdom operations against the enemy” and the promise of paradise for those who carry them out.
Anarchists have always believed in the antithesis of a Muslim state. They want a world without rule. Their first great theoretician, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, wanted to abolish centralised government altogether. This, though, would not bring the chaos with which the word anarchy is often considered synonymous. On the contrary, a sort of harmonious order would ensue, the state being replaced by a system of autonomous groups and communities, glued together by contract and mutual interest in place of laws. Justice, argued this essentially non-violent man, was the “central star” governing society.
Though Proudhon is remembered for the dictum, “Property is theft!” he actually believed that a man had the right to possess a house, some land and the tools to work it. This was too much for Mikhail Bakunin, a revolutionary nationalist turned anarchist who believed in collective ownership of the means of production. He believed, too, that “the passion for destruction is also a creative urge,” which was not a description of the regenerative workings of capitalism but a call to the barricades. Regeneration, however, was very much an anarchist theme, just as it is a jihadist one. As one of anarchism's leading interpreters, George Woodcock, has put it, “It is through the wrecks of empires and faiths that the anarchists have always seen the glittering towers of their free world arising.”
What prompts the leap from idealistic thought to violent action is largely a matter for conjecture. Every religion and almost every philosophy has drawn adherents ready to shed blood, their own included, and in the face of tyranny, poverty and exploitation, a willingness to resort to force is not hard to understand. Both anarchism and jihadism, though, have incorporated bloodshed into their ideologies, or at least some of their zealots have. And both have been ready to justify the killing not just of soldiers, policemen and other agents of the state, but also of civilians.
The heads roll
For anarchists, the crucial theory was that developed in Italy, where in 1876 Errico Malatesta put it thus: “The insurrectionary deed, destined to affirm socialist principles by acts, is the most efficacious means of propaganda.” This theory of “propaganda by deed” was cheerfully promoted by another great anarchist thinker, Peter Kropotkin, a Russian prince who became the toast of radical-chic circles in Europe and America. Whether the theory truly tipped non-violent musers into killers, or whether it merely gave a pretext to psychopaths, simpletons and romantics to commit murders, is unclear. The murders, however, are not in doubt. In deadly sequence, anarchists claimed the lives of President Sadi Carnot of France (1894), Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the prime minister of Spain (1897), Empress Elizabeth of Austria (1898), King Umberto of Italy (1900), President William McKinley of the United States (1901) and José Canalejas y Méndez, another Spanish prime minister (1912).
Such assassinations, it may be argued, were less similar to al-Qaeda's than to those of the Narodniki, the members of the Russian Party of the People's Will, who believed in “destroying the most powerful person in government” to undermine its prestige and arouse the revolutionary spirit. This they had undoubtedly done in 1881 by murdering Tsar Alexander II, even though he had been a reformer and, indeed, a liberator of the serfs. In truth, the practice of assassination is as old as the hills, though it got its name only in the 11th-13th centuries when it was followed by the Nizari Ismailiyun, a Shia sect that considered the murder of its enemies—conducted under the influence of hashish (hence assassin)—to be a religious duty.
Mr bin Laden would surely delight in some dramatic assassinations today. Presidents and prime ministers, however, do not nowadays sit reading the newspaper on the terraces of hotels where out-of-work Italian printers wander round with revolvers in their pockets, as Cánovas did, or walk the streets of Madrid unprotected while looking into bookshop windows, as Canalejas did. So Mr bin Laden must content himself with the assertion that on September 11th, “God Almighty hit the United States at its most vulnerable spot. He destroyed its greatest buildings...It was filled with terror from its north to its south and from its east to its west.”
The anarchists, too, were happy to resort to more indiscriminate acts of terror. “A pound of dynamite is worth a bushel of bullets,” said August Spies, the editor of an anarchist newspaper in Chicago, in 1886. His readers evidently agreed. A bomb thrown soon afterwards was to kill seven policemen breaking up a strikers' gathering in the city's Haymarket Square.
France, too, had its dynamitards. One of their bombs blew up the Restaurant Véry in Paris in 1892. Another, some months later, which was destined for a mining company's offices, killed six policemen and set off a flurry of wild rumours: acid had been placed in the city's water supply, it was said, churches had been mined and anarchists lurked round every corner. A year later a young anarchist, unable to earn enough to feed himself, his lover and his daughter, decided to take his own life—and at the same time make a protest. Ready to bomb but unwilling to kill, he packed some nails and a small charge of explosive into a saucepan and lobbed it from the public gallery into the Chamber of Deputies. Though it caused no deaths, he was executed—and then avenged with another bomb, this one in the Terminus café at the Gare St-Lazare which killed one customer and injured 19. The perpetrator of this outrage, designed to “waken the masses”, regretted only that it had not claimed more victims. A popular street song boasted:
It will come, it will come, Every bourgeois will have his bomb.
And many were inclined to agree. Four more bombs went off in Paris in the next two months.
Other countries were hardly more peaceful. A bomb was lobbed into a monarchist parade in Florence in 1878, another into a crowd in Pisa two days later. In 1893, two bombs were thrown into the Teatro Liceo in Barcelona, killing 22 opera-goers on the first night of the season. A year later a French anarchist blew himself up by accident in Greenwich Park in London, presumably on his way to the observatory there. Two years later, at least six people taking part in a religious procession in Barcelona were blown to bits by an anarchist bomb. Countless attempts were also made on the lives of bigger names, such as King Alfonso XII of Spain (1878), Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany (May and June 1878), Andrew Carnegie's business partner, Henry Clay Frick (Pittsburgh, 1892), a Serbian minister (Paris, 1893) and King Alfonso XIII and his English bride (Madrid, on their wedding day, 1906). In this last incident alone 20 bystanders died.
Then, as now, alarm and consternation broke out. Admittedly, violent attacks on prominent figures were quite frequent: one American president had been assassinated in 1865 (Lincoln) and another in 1881 (Garfield), and seven attempts were made on Queen Victoria's life before her reign ended in 1901, none of them by anarchists. Even so, governments could hardly do nothing. The response of some was repression and retribution, which often provoked further terrorist violence. Germany arrested 500 people after the second attack on the kaiser, many for “approving” of the attempts on his life. Spain was particularly prone to round up the usual suspects and torture them, though it also passed new laws. After the Liceo bombing, it brought in courts-martial for all crimes committed with explosives, and only military officers were allowed to be present during the trial of the supposed bombers.
France, too, resorted to unusual measures. After the bombing of the French Chamber of Deputies, 2,000 warrants were issued, anarchist clubs and cafés were raided, papers were closed down and August Vaillant, the bomber, was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death in a day. An apologist who declared that not a single man in France would grieve for the president if he confirmed the sentence (as he did), and then was assassinated (as he was), was jailed for two years for incitement to murder. The French parliament made it a crime not just to incite sedition but also to justify it. Criminal “associations of malefactors” were defined by intent rather than by action, and all acts of anarchist propaganda were banned.
Similarly, in Britain soon after last month's bombings, the prime minister, Tony Blair, announced that “condoning or glorifying terrorism” anywhere, not just in the United Kingdom, would become a crime. Places of worship used as centres for “fomenting extremism” are to be closed down. Measures will be taken to deport foreigners “fostering hatred, advocating violence to further a person's beliefs, or justifying or validating such violence.” Naturalised Britons engaged in “extremism” will be stripped of their citizenship.
Jihadists, of course, cross borders, and many are presumed to be indoctrinated by foreigners, even if they commit their deeds at home. So it was too with the anarchists, even though they often plotted and acted alone. Many of the ideas came from Russia. Besides Bakunin, Russia also produced Kropotkin, “an uncompromising apostle of the necessity of violence”, according to Barbara Tuchman in “The Proud Tower”.
Italy, by contrast, produced many of the assassins: for example, those who killed Carnot, Cánovas, Empress Elizabeth and King Umberto. It also exported utopians who founded anarchist settlements like the Cecilia colony in Brazil. Germany, too, had its share of fanatics, including Johann Most, the editor of an incendiary New York newspaper, Freiheit, and many of the Jewish anarchists who congregated in London's East End. France also sent anarchos abroad: a prominent theorist, Elisée Reclus, taught in Brussels. The man who shot McKinley was the child of Polish immigrants to America. And Switzerland, like England, played host to exiles who came and went with considerable freedom.
No wonder, then, that anti-foreigner feeling ran high in many places. In the United States, President Theodore Roosevelt asked Congress to exclude anyone who believed in “anarchistic principles” and, by treaty, to make the advocacy of killing an offence against international law. Congress duly obliged with an act that kept out anyone “teaching disbelief in or opposition to all organised government”.
By then an international conference had been held (in 1898) at the behest of Italy to seek help in fighting anarchism. The Italians did not get all they wanted: Belgium, Britain and Switzerland refused to abandon the right of asylum or to extradite suspected anarchists. But in 1893, just after the Liceo bombing, Britain had reluctantly banned open meetings of anarchists after the Liberal home secretary, H.H. Asquith, had come under attack for allowing an anarchist meeting to commemorate the Chicago Haymarket martyrs.
The vast majority of anarchists, like the vast majority of Islamists, were not violent, and some of those who once believed in bloodshed, notably Kropotkin, were to turn against it in time. But those who relished indiscriminate violence used an argument with striking similarities to that used by Mr bin Laden. Thus Emile Henry, who had left the bomb in the café at the Gare St-Lazare, was to justify his act by saying that those in the café were all “satisfied with the established order, all the accomplices and employees of Property and the State...There are no innocent bourgeois.” For his part, Mr bin Laden, in his “Letter to America” of November 2002, justifies the “aggression against civilians for crimes they did not commit” with a slightly more sophisticated variant. They deserved to die, he said, because, as American citizens, they had chosen “their government by way of their own free will, a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies.”
Such sentiments recall the characters of Conrad's “The Secret Agent” and Fyodor Dostoevsky's “Devils”. Inspired by 19th-century anarchist intellectuals and events, they describe men of almost autistic lack of empathy and contorted moral sense. For Conrad's protagonist, nicknamed the Professor, the world's morality
was artificial, corrupt and blasphemous. The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds. The Professor's indignation found in itself a final cause that absolved him from the sin of turning to destruction as the agent of his ambition. To destroy public faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the framework of an established social order cannot be effectually shattered except by some form of collective or individual violence was precise and correct. He was a moral agent—that was settled in his mind. By exercising his agency with ruthless defiance he procured for himself the appearances of power and personal prestige. That was undeniable to his vengeful bitterness. It pacified its unrest; and in their own way the most ardent of revolutionaries are perhaps doing no more but seeking for peace in common with the rest of mankind—the peace of soothed vanity, of satisfied appetites, or perhaps of appeased conscience.
Anarchists like the Professor, a quiet man who went round with a bomb in his pocket that he could detonate with the squeeze of a rubber ball should he be arrested, were difficult to detect and impossible to deter. So why did their wave of terror pass? Not, it seems, because of the measures taken to deter them. The main reason, rather, was that the world became consumed with the first world war, the Russian revolution, the fight against fascism and the struggles against colonialism. Another was that, after a while, the more rational anarchists realised that terrorism seldom achieves the ends desired of it—as the IRA has recently acknowledged.
But in truth the wave did not entirely pass; it merely changed. The anarchist terrorists of 1880-1910 were replaced by other terrorists—Fenians, Serb nationalists (one killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and thus sparked the first world war), Bolsheviks, Dashnaks (revolutionary Armenians), Poles, Macedonians, Hindu nationalists (among them the killers of Mahatma Gandhi), fascists, Zionists, Maoists, Guevarists, Black Panthers, Red Brigades, Red Army Fractions, Palestinians and even al-Qaeda's jihadists. Few of these shared the anarchists' explicit aims; all borrowed at least some of their tactics and ideas.
And the world went on. It probably would even if yesterday's dynamitards become today's plutoniumards. But terrorism is unlikely to be expunged. As long as there are men like Conrad's Professor, there will be causes to excite them, and therefore deeds to terrify their fellow citizens.
Some 25,000 Muslims from northern Nigeria's largest city of Kano on Friday turned out to support a call by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for Israel to be "wiped off the map".
The Shiite demonstrators under the auspices of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria marched through the city, a hotbed of religious and ethnic strife in the country, chanting solidarity slogans.
"What Ahmadinejad said was very clear. Israel is an illegal state which was only created after the usurpation of the Palestinian homeland," their spokesman Mohammed Turi told reporters in front of the central mosque.
"And if he says Israel should cease to exist, he is saying that the geographic location should revert to the status quo and be given back to the rightful owners," he said.
"It is most unfortunate that while Israel is bent on wiping out Palestinians through wanton destruction of their lives and properties with the silent approval of the West, Ahmadinejad's criticism has elicited the most vociferous condemnation from Israeli allies in the West," Turi said.
He slammed Arab leaders for their silence since Ahmadinejad's remarks, describing them as a sell-out.
"It is a shame that none of the Arab leaders has come out to defend this stand of Muslims of the World which Ahmadinejad voiced. Instead they are busy trying to restore ties with Israel," he said.
"Some of them are so insensitive to the plight of the Palestinians to donate six million dollars to construct a stadium in Israel while Palestinians wallow in poverty and destruction," he added.
The protesters also condemned what they called Israel's atrocities and massacres of Palestinians with the support of the United States.
The demonstrators, mostly dressed in red and white shrouds, carried a model of Jerusalem's Al-aqsa Mosque and Palestinian flags and displayed placards with the inscription "Israel must be annihilated", "we support Palestinians", "Quds (Jerusalem) belongs to Muslims", and "death to Israel, death to America," among others.
Effigies of US President George Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon were also carried while US and Israeli flags were dragged along the dusty streets of the city before they were set ablaze amidst deafening shouts of Allahu Akbar (God is greatest)".
Ahmadinejad told a conference Wednesday in Tehran entitled "The World without Zionism" that "the establishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world."
"Anyone who signs a treaty which recognises the entity of Israel means he has signed the surrender of the Muslim world," he added, warning Muslim leaders who recognise Israel they "face the wrath of their own people."
"As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map," he said, quoting Iran's late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
His comment was the first time in years that a top Iranian official has openly called for Israel's destruction.
Many countries have already expressed outrage at Ahmadinejad's comment.
When I present the truth some ridiculously go as far as accusing me of exhibiting anti-Semitic tendencies while disregarding the real troublemakers. Why would our northern neighbor's foolishness be implicitly encouraged? Their satisfaction will only come when Israel is obliterated from the face of the planet by following their road map of almost forty years ago when their miserable attempted genocide on Ndiigbo failed. This is for Nwa Aro who authoritatively stated that I privately sent something to him about Islam he found repulsive. I am now publicly saying no such thing happened. I've always utilized the public forum to share anything I have to say about any individual or group; I don't see why I would resort to clandestine mailing when my facts are airtight. You have my ok to make whatever that I sent to you public. You should know how disappointed by that post of yours on the thread started by TB.
___________________ BIAFRA: The land of my ancestors now, yesterday and always. So it will be! Posts: 2482 | From: Ala Igbo | Registered: Apr 2004
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