Jihadists in Algeria ‘behead’ French hostage Gourdel
A video posted online purports to show the execution of a Frenchman taken hostage by a group linked to the “Islamic State” known as Jund al-Khalifa. The group kidnapped the man in Algeria on Sunday.
Read more » DW
http://www.dw.de/jihadists-in-algeria-behead-french-hostage-gourdel/a-17951032
By LYDIA POLGREEN and SCOTT SAYARE
SEGOU, Mali — French paratroopers arrived in the ancient desert oasis of Timbuktu on Monday, securing its airport and main roads as thousands of residents poured out of its narrow, mud-walled streets to greet French and Malian troops, waving the two countries’ flags, with whoops, cheers and shouts.
“Timbuktu has fallen,” said the city’s mayor, Halle Ousmane Cissé, in a telephone interview from the capital, Bamako, where he has been in exile since the Islamist militants took over the city 10 months ago. He said he planned to return to his city on Tuesday.
The rapid advance to Timbuktu, a day after French and African troops took firm control of the former rebel stronghold of Gao, may spell the beginning of the end of France’s major involvement in the conflict here.
The French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, was a little more cautious than the mayor in his assessment of the situation in Timbuktu on Monday evening ….
Read more » The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/world/africa/mali-timbuktu-france-britain.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0
Members of the Ukranian women’s rights group, Femen, stage a topless demonstration against the International Olympic Committee outside City Hall on the south bank of the Thames near Tower Bridge in London. Femen claims the IOC collaborates with ‘violent’ Islamic states. Police arrested the protesters
WARNING: contains nudity » Watch Video
Courtesy: guardian.co.uk
London Olympics 2012: Naked Femen Activists Arrested in Sharia Protests [VIDEO]
Participation of countries that apply Sharia law goes against Olympic principles of peace and philanthropy, say radical feminist
Five French members of the Femen radical feminist group have been arrested in London during a topless demonstration against the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The activists wore only knickers and ….
Read more » International Business Times
Comment by Omar Ali
The writer is a former Secretary of the Indian intelligence agency RAW (an agency no more capable than other arms of the Indian government, but thought in Pakistan to possess superhuman powers and very beautiful female agents who trap Pakistani patriots, or so we hope). His views on things to come..
To read the article » In unstable fields by Vikram Sood » CLICK HERE
Via » Brown Pundits
By AFP
Paris – A French minister said there was no such thing as moderate Islam, calling recent election successes by Islamic parties in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia “worrying” in an interview published Saturday.
Jeannette Bougrab, a junior minister with responsibility for youth, told Le Parisien newspaper that legislation based on Islamic sharia law “inevitably” imposed restrictions on rights and freedoms.
Bougrab is of Algerian origin, whose father fought on the French colonial side during Algeria’s war of independence, and said she was speaking as “a French woman of Arab origin.”
“It’s very worrying,” she was quoted as saying. “I don’t know of any moderate Islam.”
“There are no half measures with sharia,” she added. “I am a lawyer and you can make all the theological, literal or fundamental interpretations of it that you like but law based on sharia is inevitably a restriction on freedom, especially freedom of conscience.” ….
Read more » AL ARABIYA NEWS
– Heroic Tale of Holocaust, With a Twist
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
PARIS — The stories of the Holocaust have been documented, distorted, clarified and filtered through memory. Yet new stories keep coming, occasionally altering the grand, incomplete mosaic of Holocaust history.
One of them, dramatized in a French film released here last week, focuses on an unlikely savior of Jews during the Nazi occupation of France: the rector of a Paris mosque.
Muslims, it seems, rescued Jews from the Nazis.
“Les Hommes Libres” (“Free Men”) is a tale of courage not found in French textbooks. According to the story, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the founder and rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, provided refuge and certificates of Muslim identity to a small number of Jews to allow them to evade arrest and deportation.
It was simpler than it sounds. In the early 1940s France was home to a large population of North Africans, including thousands of Sephardic Jews. The Jews spoke Arabic and shared many of the same traditions and everyday habits as the Arabs. Neither Muslims nor Jews ate pork. Both Muslim and Jewish men were circumcised. Muslim and Jewish names were often similar.
The mosque, a tiled, walled fortress the size of a city block on the Left Bank, served as a place to pray, certainly, but also as an oasis of calm where visitors were fed and clothed and could bathe, and where they could talk freely and rest in the garden. …
Read more → The New York Times
– France halts heavy military equipment sale to Pak
New Delhi, May 27 (ANI): France has said that it has put the sale of heavy military equipment to Pakistan on hold.
French Defence Minister Gerard Longuet told reporters in New Delhi that France it would only sell light defence hardware to Pakistan.
“This point was raised during the bilateral meeting with Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani in Paris recently. I can tell you that only military equipment that are being sold to Pakistan at the moment are interception electronic means to fight against terrorism,” Longuet said.
“In fact, at this stage, heavy military equipment are not being sold… because we want to have certainty that we can intercept light communication equipments used by terrorists… In fact, we have discouraged any request [from Pakistan] for heavy equipment,” he added.News on New Delhi.
Before reading this argument on recent Burqa-ban by France, you need to know who I am. Raised in an orthodox Muslim Deobandi family, I’ve been educated in Pakistan’s Punjab where urban middle class used to be too sensitive about purdah in 1980s and 90s – the decades when I went to school and then university. Being first generation migrated out of the village in a big city, my father was a part of purdah sensitive educated middle class professional class. But my mother, raised and educated in a secular and Sufist Sindh, fought against Burqa throughout her life in order to save me from this ‘curse’ as she would put it.
Mom succeeded in this battle to the best of my luck and now no one expects her or me in Burqa or purdah in general. …
Read more : Let Us Build Pakistan
Ivory Coast politician Laurent Gbagbo has surrendered after a military assault on his residence in Abidjan and has been put under UN guard.
Forces of his UN-recognised successor, Alassane Ouattara, and French tanks advanced on his residence where he had been ensconced in a bunker. …
Read more : BBC
by Mona Eltahawy, Columnist for Al Masry Al Youm, Al Arab
NEW YORK – If Tunisia kicked down the door of the Arab imagination by showing it was possible to topple a dictator, Egypt drew a blueprint of non-violence for the house of revolution that detailed how to demolish a stubbornly entrenched dictator; and now in Libya a mad man is trying to burn down the entire house rather than face eviction.
For 42 years, Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s antics have blinded too many to a brutality they finally see on full display as he desperately tries to quash the most serious uprising against his rule. If too many chose to not see, Libyans have known all too well.
Half the struggle for Libyans has surely been getting the world to move beyond Gadhafi the Clown, a role he seems to have uninhibitedly embraced. Who hasn’t been distracted by the eclectic wardrobe, the Kalashnikov-armed female bodyguards, and the tents he would pitch at home and abroad for talks with officials.
A source of embarrassment for Libyans, Gadhafi has never been a joke: disappearances, a police state, zero freedom of expression and poverty for at least a third of the population of country tremendously wealthy thanks to oil.
For years, Gadhafi squandered that wealth on causes and radical violence abroad that he chose because they epitomized the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” school of diplomacy. In 2003, just as the U.S. became mired in Iraq and its non-existent weapons of mass destruction, Gadhafi realized no one was scared of him anymore and voluntarily gave up his weapons of mass destruction programs.
When the world has paid attention to his crimes it has invariably been to those against non-Libyans such as the mid-air bombings of a French airliner over Niger and of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland. Once he compensated families who lost relatives in those attacks, Gadhafi became persona grata and money and business deals came in, along with high-level dignitaries. …
Read more : Huffingtonpost
By: Abdul Khalique Junejo.
Holding of general elections and subsequent formation of government, some times coalitions, is just a routine matter and a normal course of life in the countries of Western Europe. But not so in the case of Belgium, the country considered and called to be the ‘Capital of Europe’ since it provides headquarters for European Union and the NATO. The recently held general elections in this tiny country of about 10 millions people made bigger and eye-catching head-lines in the world media; not for any ‘Landside Victory’ but because of a split mandate, a mandate that threatens to split the country. For example the news paper carried the headlines; “Separatists claim victory in Belgian election”. These developments have generated extraordinary interest in this part of the world as many regions /peoples here are encountering the problems of similar nature.
Belgium, being situated between France and Holland, is a bi-lingual country comprising the French-speaking Wallonia people and Flemish-speaking Flanders. For many years the emphasis on the linguistic identity has been on the rise and recently quite vociferous voices have been heard for the dissolution of Belgium and creation of a separate country for the Flemish-speaking people of Dutch origin. New Flemish Alliance, the party advocating for separate country, has emerged as the largest party, not only among the Flanders but in the country as a whole. This has given an exceeding impetus to the demands for the parting of ways between the Flanders and the Wallonia.
Pakistan was created by conjoining of different peoples with their own distinct identity based on history, language and culture. After creation of the new country, these peoples (Bengalis, Sindhis, Balochs etc) started demanding recognition of their identity and asking for the promotion of their culture and language. In response the state-organs used the force of gun and the state-intellectuals used the force of pen to suppress such demands and, instead, promote and impose ‘single identity, single language and single culture’. This ‘strategy’ created strong reaction which manifested itself in the shape of mass movements for the ‘restoration’ of different identities.
One of these movements, Bengali, culminated in the ‘split’ of Pakistan and creation of a new country. Bangladesh while Sindhi and Baloch movements are getting fiercer by the time.
NEW YORK: WikiLeaks, citing a French official, in its revelations has also hit Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani.
The released documents alleged that COAS has influence on government and the parliament. It said that opposition of Kayani led to the conflict on Kerry-Lugar bill, adding that he is also responsible for refraining the government to change its policy over FATA. …
Read more : The News
More details : BBC urdu
— — — —
Courtesy: DunyaTV (Tonight with Najam Sethi, 30 November, 2010)
via ZemTV, – YouTube Link
WE can not blame others
By Shakeel Nizamani
Quebecers (French Canadians) are proud people, proud of their language and culture. They have fought back against the influence of English in Canada. The other day, I was talking to a lady of French origin, she told me that there was a time when French used to be beaten up in streets because of their unawareness of English language. They fought back and got respect for their language not only at provincial level (in Quebec province particularly and in other provinces generally but at federal level too.)
We Sindhis, victim of complex, some of us feel ashamed of our own Sindhi language and teach children the language of others.
Sometimes it is bit dishearten that even Sindhis are not speaking in Sindhi in their homes. So we cant blame others but our own mistreatment of Sindhi.
Courtesy: Sindhi e-lists/ e-groups.
Indus Asia Online Journal (Click here to go to home page) 