Wartime Contracting Commission: State Department Response "Unacceptable"

(ht Huffington Post) During questioning by Cong. Michael Thibault of Ambassador John Herbst, coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization, representing the US State Department:

I'd like to offer it to poor staff work. In other words, staff should be monitoring—you know, so many communications come across, but I don't know because, as of late last week,—we didn't have a response, and no response was acknowledged.

So Ambassador Herbst, I tried to give you a heads up on this—in fairness—but what's going on, and where's the response, and why hasn't someone worked with your secretary to—you know, you report directly to the secretary—your office does. So you must sit in staff meetings where they talk about the most important things, and contracting and coordination, and a contingent environment is pretty powerful today.

Where's this response?

HERBST:
Certainly, coordination is a very important issue, but I'm afraid I could just tell you that this is being looked at and given serious consideration, and a response will be forthcoming.

THIBAULT:
OK. Well, my time is almost up, but I'll just have to make this statement. I am the Democrat in this bipartisan group, but in this particular case, I am compelled to say that's unacceptable. And I would ask you to go back and say—because I think the Secretary of Defense has been much more diplomatic than I have here by saying it's unacceptable, but I think I have to call it like it is.

Earlier, Cong. Thibault had noted conclusions of an earlier hearing:

Our witnesses agreed that there are serious gaps and defects in interagency coordination of reconstruction and stabilization projects and that these shortcomings can put huge sums of money at risk of waste and undermine our efforts to improve the lives of people in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These concerns apply not only to U.S. government agencies, but to operations conducted by our coalition partners, non-government entities and international organizations like the World Bank and the United Nations.

Dutch Election Victory for Geert Wilders

From Radio Netherlands:

The anti-Islam party of far-right politician Geert Wilders has made major gains in local elections held in the Netherlands. The party took part in two cities and has become the largest party in Almere and the second largest in the Hague.

Votes are still coming in but it is clear that the Freedom Party has taken around 20 percent of the vote. Geert Wilders told Dutch TV that it was fantastic day for his party.

"This is a springboard for the vote on June 9," said Wilders refering to the forthcoming national elections.

An opinion poll held earlier in the wake of the local vote showed that national Wilders'Freedom Party had the most support in the Netherlands and would be the biggest party nationally, another poll put them as the third biggest party a few seats behind the established political parties.

Diane Ravitch: Obama Picks Worse School as Rhode Island Model

From the Huffington Post. To be fair, perhaps they didn't teach the President how to make valid comparisons when Obama attended the private Punahou School in Hawaii (tuition $17,300 per annum), private Columbia University (tuition $18,735) or private Harvard Law School (tuition $39,325).

President Obama thought it was wonderful that every educator at Central Falls High School was fired. At an appearance before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on March 1, the President applauded the idea of closing the school and getting rid of everyone in it. At the same meeting, President Obama acknowledged Margaret Spellings, who was President George W. Bush's Education Secretary, because she "helped to lead a lot of the improvement that's been taking place and we're building on."

Well, yes, the President is right; his own education reform plans are built right on top of the shaky foundation of President Bush's No Child Left Behind program. The fundamental principle of school reform, in the Age of Bush and Obama, is measure and punish. If students don't get high enough scores, then someone must be punished! If the graduation rate hovers around 50%, then someone must be punished. This is known as "accountability."

President Obama says that Central Falls must close because only 7% of the students are proficient in math, and the graduation rate is only 48%. Sounds bad, right?

But the President has saluted a high school in Providence, Rhode Island, called "The Met" whose scores are no different from the scores at Central Falls High School. At Central Falls, 55% of the kids are classified as "proficient readers," just like 55% at The Met. In math, only 7% of students at Central Falls are proficient in math, but at The Met--which the President lauds--only 4% are proficient in math. Ah, but The Met has one big advantage over Central Falls High Schools: Its graduation rate is 75.6%.

But figure this one out: How can a high school where only 4% of the students are proficient in math and only 55% are proficient readers produce a graduation rate of 75.6%? To this distant observer, it appears that the school with lower graduation standards rates higher in President Obama's eyes.

Rhode Island's Mass Teacher Firings Drive Cost Obama Union Support

The Providence Journal reports on the crisis at Central Falls High School:

The wildfire of national debate over the mass firings at Central Falls High School spread further Tuesday, when the executive council of the AFL-CIO unanimously condemned the removal of all 93 teachers, support staff and administrators at the city’s only high school.

The executive council said its members were “appalled” that President Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan had endorsed the terminations in recent comments, and said the firings will not help the 800 students at the high school, which is one of the poorest and lowest-performing schools in Rhode Island.

“We stand in support of the Central Falls Teachers Union in its fight to improve teaching and learning … preserve the rights of its members and keep the teachers where they belong,” the council said in a statement. “We call on the Central Falls administration to return to negotiations … and seek, in good faith, a collaborative path to proven reforms that provide students with the opportunity to succeed.”

A few hours later, Central Falls Teachers Union president Jane Sessums offered an alternative reform plan for the troubled school, which closely resembled a set of conditions proposed by Supt. Frances Gallo that the two sides failed to agree on during negotiations last month. Money was the main sticking point.

Tuesday, Sessums said the high school teachers would agree to a longer school day for students; providing more support for students; and submitting to rigorous evaluations — three conditions in Gallo’s proposal. She also said the teachers want a “research-based high school reform program” they believe will achieve good results.

“This proposal is a start, and we know that more can and should be done,” Sessums said. “We are ready to collaborate with the district and work toward changes that will ultimately give our students the education they deserve.”

Gallo said she had not been contacted by the union and was learning of the proposal for the first time Tuesday evening. “I have no comment at this time,” she said.

On Monday, the union filed three unfair labor practice charges against the school district, the union’s first move to appeal the mass firings.

Marcia Reback, president of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers, which represents the Central Falls teachers, said the local union filed three charges against the district: failure to negotiate; refusal to provide information to the union and terminations in retaliation for the teachers’ union activities.

“The primary reason [for the filings] is that we want to secure the jobs of the Central Falls teachers themselves,” Reback said. “But we also know this situation is a national situation. If what happened in Central Falls is upheld, it will set a precedent across the United States.”

According to the Central Falls High School website, the school has at least one celebrity alumna. The school is Alma Mater to actress Oscar Nominee Viola Davis (Best Supporting Actress, Doubt).
More here.

Joshua Foust on the Battle of Marja

In today's New York Times, Registan blogger Josh Foust calls for the US military to set up what sounds like an Afghan version of the US Department of Agriculture's Farm Service Agency's price support program, in which farmers are paid not to grow certain crops, to reduce opium production in Afghanistan:

Good government will matter little, though, if the local economy is in a shambles. Marja’s agricultural base relies primarily on opium, and any new counternarcotics policies will wreak havoc; arresting or killing the drug traffickers will ultimately be the same as attacking local farmers. The timing of the offensive could not be more damaging: opium is planted in the winter and harvested in the spring, which means those who planted last year cannot recoup their investment.

In Helmand, opium is the only way farmers can acquire credit: they take out small loans, called salaam, from narcotics smugglers or Taliban officials, often in units of poppy seed, and pay back that loan in opium paste after harvest. If they cannot harvest their opium, they are in danger of defaulting on their loan — a very dangerous proposition.

Western aid groups distributed wheat seeds last fall, but there was little follow-up and it seems few farmers used them. This year, the aid workers should be prepared to pay farmers compensation for any opium crops they are unable to harvest as a result of the fighting, and the Western coalition should help the groups develop a microcredit system.

Speaking of The Hurt Locker...

Author Mark Monday recently sent this email to members of the National Press Club's Book & Author committee, about his work on an "Ambush Field Manual" for the US Military, available to the American public from Amazon.com under the title Killing Zone: A Professional’s Guide To Preparing Or Preventing Ambushes:

Being a writer you may appreciate the thrill of penning some scribblings that can potentially save the lives of our soldiers. Pardon my post, but now that I am effectively out of journalism there are few people, other than those of you with me on the Book and Author Committee at the National Press Club, with whom I can share my euphoria. Few people, usually only other writers, fully understand the experience of writing.

Although most American troops killed in the decades from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq have died in ambushes of one kind or another, including explosive IED ambushes, the U.S. military has not published an ambush field manual since the 1950s. Troops had to find mentions of ambushes in other manuals, five pages here, three pages there and perhaps two pages somewhere else. In 1994 Gary Stubblefield, a former Navy SEAL commander, and I tried to fill the gap. A publisher friend agreed to put the book on his list. Our book, Killing Zone, provided extensive basic instruction in the area. The book was never designed to be on the New York Times bestseller list; it certainly met its design. But we found out later to our satisfaction, that Killing Zone was being used by U.S. military instructors as a supplementary text when training troops. LTC Joshua Potter, a Green Beret now on his fourth tour of duty in Iraq, was one of the Special Forces members trained using Killing Zone. Josh and I met in 2008 at a government conference on complex operations. A year ago he told me had been trained with Killing Zone and had used the knowledge successfully in the war zone. But, he cautioned, much of it was outdated by new equipment and techniques. He was thinking of handing out a sheaf of update papers along with the book when teaching his own troops. I suggested we ask the publisher to allow us to revise the book—if Josh would lead the effort. Josh agreed. The publisher agreed. Over the last year LTC Potter and I have been reviewing and revising the original version to create a book that you, and most Americans, will never have any interest in reading. That revision, Ambush! was formally published this week.

There is a corollary to this: Shortly before LTC Potter revised the book, writers whom I had worked with—writers doing a manual for Navy SEALs—phoned to ask if they could include parts of Killing Zone in the new manual they were writing. Since the original idea of Killing Zone was to help our service personnel I immediately gave permission. But I was curious to see what part they found useful enough to plug into their manual. I asked. The reply was “we can’t tell you what we want to use. It’s classified.” But both Killing Zone and Ambush! are easily accessible by troops, unlike the SEAL manual.

As Richard Danzig, the former Secretary of the Navy and an advisor to the Obama campaign, wrote in his foreword to the new version – Ambush! – “For those who are smart enough not just to read it, but to study and apply it, this manual will save lives.”

Of all the words I’ve ever penned, the ones in this book probably have the best potential of saving lives of our Soldiers. I cannot think of a higher compliment to LTC Potter’s work, his dedication to protecting his troops by educating them about the most prevalent enemy tactic, or his efforts to improve their own offensive operations than Secretary Danzig’s words: “this manual will save lives.” I’m thrilled to have a small part in this project.

Best,
Mark Monday

Christopher Hitchens v. Amnesty International

Writing in The Australian, Christopher Hitchens comes to the defense of Gita Sahgal:

This organisation is precious to me and to millions of other people, including many thousands of men and women who were and are incarcerated and maltreated because of their courage as dissidents, and who regained their liberty as a consequence of Amnesty International's unsleeping work.

So to learn of its degeneration and politicisation is to be reading about a moral crisis that has global implications.

Amnesty International has just suspended one of its senior officers, a woman named Gita Sahgal who, until recently, headed the organisation's gender unit. It's fairly easy to summarise her concern in her own words. "To be appearing on platforms with Britain's most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment," she wrote. One may think that to be an uncontentious statement, but it led to her immediate suspension.

The background is also distressingly easy to summarise. Moazzam Begg, a British citizen, was arrested in Pakistan after fleeing Afghanistan in the aftermath of the intervention in 2001. He was imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, then released.

He has since become the moving spirit in a separate organisation calling itself Cageprisoners.

Begg does not deny his past as an Islamist activist, which took him to Afghanistan in the first place. He does not withdraw from his statement that the Taliban was the best government available to Afghanistan.

Cageprisoners has another senior member, Asim Qureshi, who speaks in defence of jihad at rallies sponsored by extremist group Hizb-ut Tahrir (banned in many Muslim countries). Cageprisoners also defends men such as Abu Hamza, leader of the mosque that sheltered Richard "Shoe Bomber" Reid among many other violent and criminal characters who have been convicted in open court of heinous offences that have nothing at all to do with freedom of expression.

Yet Amnesty International includes Begg in delegations that petition the British government about human rights. For Sahgal to say that Cageprisoners has a program that goes "way beyond being a prisoners' rights organisation" is to say the very least of it.

But that's all she had to say to be suspended from her job.

As I write this, she is experiencing some difficulty in getting a lawyer to represent her. Such is -- so far -- the prestige of Amnesty International.

"Although it is said that we must defend everybody no matter what they've done," she comments, "it appears that if you're a secular, atheist, Asian British woman, you don't deserve a defence from our civil rights firms."

That may well change and I hope it does. But Sahgal has it slightly wrong. Amnesty International was not set up to defend everybody, no matter what they did. No organisation in the world could hope to do that.

IRA bombers and Khmer Rouge killers and generals Augusto Pinochet and Jorge Rafael Videla were not Amnesty prisoners when they eventually faced the bar of the court.

Wall Street Journal: Amnesty International Fronts for Taliban

On today's op-ed page, Michael Weiss reports there's apparently no free speech for Amnesty International employees, at least not when criticizing Taliban, in the case of Gita Saghal:

Enter Ms. Sahgal, a longtime Amnesty employee who believed that her organization's support for Mr. Begg betrayed its core principles. She went public with her concerns in a Feb. 7 interview with London's Sunday Times in which she called the collaboration "a gross error of judgment" that posed a serious threat to human rights and to Amnesty's reputation. Amnesty suspended Ms. Sahgal from her job, claiming it didn't want her opinion of Mr. Begg to be confused with its own.

Amnesty continues to defend its affiliation with Mr. Begg and Cageprisoners. Last week, on a Canadian radio program, Amnesty's interim Secretary General Claudio Cordone described Mr. Begg's politics as benign, saying there was so far no evidence to suggest that the organization should sever ties with him.

This is nonsense, says Ms. Sahgal via telephone in her home in London. "Amnesty has messaged him as a human-rights advocate . . . He was in Taliban Afghanistan. He was not a charity worker."

Especially galling for Ms. Sahgal is the fact that she only accepted her job after insisting to Widney Brown, senior director of International Law and Policy at Amnesty, that she be allowed to address the Begg alliance.

"I told her, 'If you don't give me the power to clean up this Begg situation, I won't take on the gender affairs assignment. Widney encouraged me to write a memo on it and even came past my office late one night while I was writing to discuss it. There was no internal resistance against this. So I was promoted with full support. Then, when the Sunday Times story broke, everything I uncovered was deemed 'innuendo.'"

For Ms. Sahgal, her case is not simply a minor lapse in judgment. She thinks the problem is systemic. "This is a very peculiarly ideological approach to human rights, which misses the point."

Novelist Salman Rushdie had harsher words. In a public statement, he said that Amnesty had "done its reputation incalculable damage" by allying with Mr. Begg. "It looks very much as if Amnesty's leadership is suffering from a kind of moral bankruptcy, and has lost the ability to distinguish right from wrong."

Are Wall Street Bailout Bonuses 21st Century "Welfare Cadillacs"?

IMHO, Bankers who used federal bailout money to pay themselves bonuses are today's welfare queens. Definition from Wikipedia:

A welfare queen is a pejorative phrase used in the United States to describe people who are accused of collecting excessive welfare payments through fraud or manipulation. Sensational reporting on welfare fraud began during the early-1960s, appearing in general interest magazines such as Readers Digest. The term entered the American lexicon during Ronald Reagan's 1976 presidential campaign when he described a "welfare queen" from Chicago's South Side.

Here's a link to lyrics from Guy Drake's 1970 country-western song, Welfare Cadillac. Just substitute "rich folks" for poor folks, and "mansion" or "penthouse" for shack, and it works for Wall Street executives...

Well, I've never worked much
In fact, I've been poor all my life
I guess I really own is
Ten kids and a wife

This house is a lived in mine
But it's really a shack
But I always managed somehow
To drive me a brand new Cadillac

Backdoor steps
They done fell plum down
Front screen door's off and laying
Somewhere out there on the ground

Wind just now whupped another piece
Of that old tar roofing off the back
Sure hope it don't skin up that new Cadillac

Front porch ?, they're loose at the bottom
It don't make no sense to fix them
Cause that floor just too darn rotten

Wintertime, we sometimes have some snow
That blows in through the cracks
It gets too bad, we just all pile up
Sleep out there in that new Cadillac

I know the place ain't much but
I sure don't pay no rent
I get the check the first of every month
From this here federal government

Every Wednesday, I get commodities
Sometimes, four or five sacks
Pick em up down at the welfare office
Driving that new Cadillac

Some folks say I'm crazy
And I'd even been called a fool
But my kids get free books and
All them there free lunches at school

We get peanut butter and cheese
And, man, they give us flour by the sack
Course, them welfare checks
They make the payments on this new Cadillac

The way that I see it
These other folks are the fools
They're working and paying taxes
Just to send my youngins through school

Salvation Army cuts our hair and
Gives us the clothes we wear on our back
So we can dress up and ride around
And show off this new Cadillac

But things still gonna get better yet
At least that's what I understand
They tell me this new President
Put in a whole new poverty plan

Why, he gonna send us poor folks money
They say we gonna get it out here in stacks
In fact, my wife's already shopping around
For her new Cadillac

Losing Dutch Government Pulls Out of Afghanistan

But, there's a twist, per the Financial Times:

As Mr Balkenende's Christian Democrats and Wouter Bos's Labour party traded blame for the government's collapse, the victors appeared to be the smaller parties. Not least among them was the Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders, the anti-immigration politician.

Opinion polls suggest that Mr Wilders's party could win up to 24 of the 150 seats in parliament, up from nine. The party is likely to beat Labour to second place, with the Christian Democrats keeping the top spot.

That raises the prospect of a European government forming a coalition with a party with policies that include "encouraging" Muslim immigrants to return to their countries of origin, banning the construction of mosques and withdrawing the vote in local elections from non-Dutch citizens.

Spartacus at the Kennedy Center

Friday night, someone I know and yours truly attended a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet's 1968 production of Spartacus. It looked something like a cross between the 1960 Kirk Douglas Hollywood spectacular, a folkloric Caucasian knife-dance, West Side Story, the Gruzia nightclub floor-show in Tashkent, and a Victory Day parade in Moscow. Although we heard some mutterings from Kennedy Center patrons, not accustomed to seeing leaping Roman Legionnaires or goose-stepping in ballets (since the Romans were pretty clearly modeled on Nazis, and the slaves danced a lot like Russians defending the motherland during the Great Patriotic War [aka WWII])--we enjoyed it. Especially since one of our first Russian lessons, in a textbook no doubt originating in the Soviet era, featured going v teatr na Spartak. Finally, after years of hearing about it in grammar lessons, we had finally managed to see Spartak! (Also the name of a football club, and a chocolate brand, among other Russian favorites.)

In the audience, we ran into someone else we know, who later told me that Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotamayor had been sitting a few rows in front of her, in the orchestra (so modest, why not a box?). A google search (for we saw different dancers than the Washington Post critic reviewed) turned up this interesting account of the same performance, from Yelena Osipova, balletomane and explainer of Russian culture--as well as graduate student in Washington, DC:

Tonight, I was joined by two lovely friends for an experience I'm sure I will cherish for a long time: I finally saw Aram Khachaturian's "Spartacus" performed live by Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet, at the Kennedy Center. I admired Khachaturian's work since I was at elementary school (all those hours spent practicing the "fortepiano"...); and later, as I explored classical music a little further, I came to the conclusion that the Armenian-Soviet composer was certainly one of the greatest composers of the 20th Century (not that I'm biased, of course!).

You can listen to some of the music on this YouTube clip:

Phyllis Chesler: Make Ali Alyami US Ambassador to the Islamic Conference

She concludes this interview with the nomination on Pajamas Media's blog:

Q: Have you also taken a stand in favor of tolerance for apostasy? And against honor killing and honor-related violence? What has happened?

Yes to all of the above. We research, write, and analyze and expose these violations of human rights through the internet, conferences and media releases. The results are impressive, especially with Saudis.

Q: Give me some examples of the kind of foundations, institutes, conferences, etc. that have not invited you to speak or that have challenged you in other ways.

A: Only the Hudson Institute in DC has asked me to speak, even though our Center is the only organization focused totally on Saudi Arabia.

Q: Do you believe a pro-democracy political organization launched by Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents can be successful?

A: It depends on the individuals and groups and the form of democracy they seek. Most Muslims believe that democracy American-style cannot work in Muslim countries but can be modified to suit the religious and cultural heritage of Muslim societies. CDHR promotes American-style democracy where the individuals, male or female, are in charge of their lives and destiny.

Q: How have you been treated by apologists for Saudi Arabia?

A: Not well, even though they don’t disagree with my platform. Their disagreement with me is not philosophical as much as concern for material gain for their own projects and institutions. They are hired to promote Saudi policy and interests and to polish their tarnished image.

Q: Have you ever tried to visit Saudi Arabia? What happened?

A: I have. I was denied a visa. I am a peaceful promoter of genuine democratic reforms where power emanates from the people. I am opposed to religious totalitarianism, gender segregations and inequality. I believe that religion is a belief and not a tool of oppression, control, divisiveness, squandering of public wealth, incitement against non-Muslims and justification for child and forced marriages.

Q: Do you correspond with or talk to your family? Has your work endangered them? Have they been forced to cut you off?

A: I don’t talk to my family in Saudi Arabia and they don’t talk to me either. Saudi society is highly self-regulated because of decades of brutal reprisals by the Saudi ruling family and its ubiquitous security apparatus like the legalized terrorist religious police, known as Matawain or domesticators.

Q: What consequences has your leaving had for you in terms of family left behind and for your work?

Nothing can be more emotionally lonely and excruciating for me than not being able to visit my homeland, family, friends and be able to walk in the simple neighborhoods where I was born, reared, grew and worked.

Q: Who or what keeps you going in the face of so many obstacles?

A: Commitment to do something bigger than me. I have lived under the yoke of tyranny. Consequently, I value my liberty, not just for me but for the oppressed people of my motherland whose freedom is in the best interest of the Middle East and the international community.
——————-
President Obama should consider Dr. Alyami as another kind of representative to the Organization of the Islamic Conference–one who would be less interested in appeasing them than in facilitating a reformation.

Salim Mansur on the Trial of Geert Wilders

From the Toronto Sun:

Holland is not alone in this effort to appease the Islamists. Across the West, a chill has fallen over the fundamental right to think and speak freely about Islam like any other subject of public interest.

The not-so-curious fact that the mainstream media remains silent by not exposing the travesty in bringing Wilders to court for expressing his thoughts on Islam — it also remained silent by not publishing the Danish cartoons that incited a large number of Muslims around the world to rage and commit acts of violence — is proof of how great is the peril of western societies conceding de facto or de jure to Islamist demands for Shariah-based rulings.

There is terrible irony in this. Muslims remain the first victims of a Shariah-governed society, and the imposition of Shariah is the primary cause of the contemporary retardation of Muslim countries.

But the Islamists have succeeded in making the argument that the faith in, and the practice of, Islam is confined by the Shariah, and anything outside of it is non-Islam.

This argument deliberately obscures the fact that the Shariah is a legal system devised under Arab supremacy during the last three centuries of the first millennium and it was based on a reading of the Qur’an that reflected the prejudices of that age in history.

Redundant

The Shariah is not merely outdated, it is mostly redundant for any Muslim society straining to be relevant to the demands of the modern age of science and democracy.

Muslims struggling for democracy and freedom understand best that Islam cannot be reduced to the Shariah, and their progress demands the eventual abolition of the Shariah.

Mohamed Charfi, professor emeritus in the law faculty in Tunis and a former education minister in Tunisia writing as a modern Muslim, explains how the Shariah is contextually bound to the thinking of the ancient and medieval world and, consequently, resistant to any reform.

Charfi writes the Shariah or “Muslim law is based on three fundamental inequalities: The superiority of men over women, of Muslims over non-Muslims, and of free persons over slaves.

It recognizes the maximum advantages in the case of a free and rich Muslim male, and the fewest rights in the case of a non-Muslim female slave … Muslim law is therefore fundamentally discriminatory.”

Hence any Shariah compliance by the West undermines the struggle of Muslims for reform of their societies and defeat of the Islamists.

And placing any constraint on freedom of speech means in effect colluding with the Islamists.

Mark Weil's Murderers Sentenced in Uzbekistan

Ferghana.ru photo
Mark Weil,
Uzbekistan's most important theatrical impressario (his family lives in Seattle) was murdered by fundamentalist Islamist extremists--just like Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam--reports the BBC:

A court in Tashkent has found three men guilty of murdering Uzbekistan's most prominent theatre director in 2007.

The men said they had planned the murder of Mark Weil in response to his portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad in his play, Imitating the Koran.

Yakub Gafurov, the man who fatally stabbed the theatre director, was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

And two former police officers were sentenced to 17 years each for helping to plot the murder.

The Russian-language Ilkhom theatre company, founded by Mr Weil in the 1970s, staged challenging productions despite Soviet era censorship.

Ferghana.ru has more on the story:

On February 17, 2010 the Mirabad district criminal court held the final session on the case of three defendants: Yokub Gafurov, Alisher Satarov and Kakhramon Pulatov, accused of the murder of Mark Weil, the founder and artistic director of Ilhom Theater.

The judge Shamsutdinova announced the verdict: Yokub Gafurov is sentenced to 19 year of jail, five of which to be spent in the maximum security penal colony. Satarov and Pulatov will serve 17 years of jail in the standard regime penal colony.
Fatima Pirieva, the lawyer of Gafurov, says that in accordance with the decree of Senate Oliy Mazhlis (the parliament) of Uzbekistan "On amnesty due to 18th anniversary of the Republic of Uzbekistan independence", dated August 28, 2009, there is distinct possibility that Satarov and Pulatov will serve no more than 13 years each. Gafurov’s situation, however, is not the case.

All three deliberate criminals were accused of intended killing under article 97 of Criminal Code with aggravating damages, "motivated by religious prejudices" and "committed by the group of people or member of organized criminal group". According to this article, every defendant could be sentenced to 15-25 years of jail and even imprisonment for life.

At one of the last court sessions the prosecutor demanded 19 year term for everyone. However, only Gafurov that killed Weil is sentenced to this term. The court ignored the fact that the murderer ate the dust.

- I am positive that if Gafurov did not eat the dust this case would be never detected! – Pirieva says.

Another assisting offender Umid Iskhakov (allegedly, the manager of the murderous assault) is currently wanted by police. Assumingly, he left for USA.

Curiously, the New York Times, which reported the murder in a story by Anna Kisselgoff on September 8, 2007, has not yet published a single story on the trial and conviction of Mark Weil's killers.

According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the wanted man "may be living in the United States." If this is true, it raises a serious question: How did a wanted killer of an internationally-renowned theatrical artist manage to obtain a US visa? Who signed off on the decision at the US State Department?

More on this story in the European Jewish Press. Details of the Ilkhom Theatre's production of Puskhin's "Imitations of the Koran" can be found on their website. From Mark Weil's statement:

The poetical spirit of Pushkin - the Russian poet with African roots - is just ABOVE everything, including nationalism and the religious pettiness as well. That is quite possible to be the main reason the Russian poet wrote the Imitations of the Koran.

We took our time trying to find the right way to understand and express the text - we showed some sketches to the spectators 2 years ago. We were working over the final variant of, when the 11th of September in New York shocked the world - the terrorists tried to approve the action as if the Koran made them to. Also we do understand those who directed that devil's performance in New-York would never take in the Imitations of the Koran performance as any interpretation of Koran on the stage. There appeared a lot of people of different persuasions who were surprised found us working the Koran's theme. What's more they took the Koran as the instruction for the terrorists. However, the fact doesn't surprise us: the world is blind and ignorant still. Our will is Pushkin - who was ABOVE everything - to reconcile us all. It's out of the fact he was interested in nothing but the spirit and the philosophy of the primal source, the beauty of his poetry that he as the great poet appreciated so much.

We do not try to disprove a well-known Kipling's saying that East is east as West is west - they could never change. Our aim is to prove the synthesis of national and cosmopolitan consciousness promotes the creation of the contemporary art, and nothing more.

Le Monde carried this story, in French.

Classic Poetry Aloud

In looking for material for my undergraduate writing class, I came across an interesting website featuring classic poetry podcasts: Classic Poetry Aloud. Here's a link to their version of James Russell Lowell's "We Will Speak Out."

We Will Speak Out
by James Russell Lowell (1819 – 1891)

We will speak out, we will be heard,
Though all earth's system's crack;
We will not bate a single word,
Nor take a letter back.
Let liars fear, let cowards shrink,
Let traitors turn away;
Whatever we have dared to think
That dare we also say.
We speak the truth, and what care we
For hissing and for scorn,
While some faint gleamings we can see
Of Freedom's coming morn?

Mark Steyn on the Trial of Geert Wilders

Despite the cone of silence at the Washington Post, New York Times and other mainstream media outlets, Geert Wilders' trial has sparked intelligent commentary from columnists such as Maclean's Mark Steyn:

In the Low Countries, whenever anyone seeks to discuss Islam outside the very narrow bounds of multicultural political discourse, they wind up either banned (Belgium’s Vlaams Blok), forced into exile (Ayaan Hirsi Ali) or killed (Pim Fortuyn).

It’s remarkable how speedily “the most tolerant country in Europe,” in a peculiarly repellent strain of coercive appeasement, has adopted “shoot the messenger” as an all-purpose cure-all for “Islamophobia.” To some of us, the Netherlands means tulips, clogs, windmills, fingers in the dike. To others, it means marijuana cafés, long-haired soldiers, legalized hookers, fingers in the dike. But the contemporary reality is an increasingly incoherent polity where gays are bashed, uncovered women get jeered at, and you can’t do The Diary of Anne Frank as your school play lest the Gestapo walk-ons are greeted by audience cries of “She’s in the attic!” Speaking as a bona fide far-right nutcase, I rather resent the label’s export to Holland: Pim Fortuyn wasn’t “right-wing,” he was a gay hedonist; Theo van Gogh was an anti-monarchist coke-snorting nihilist; Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a secular liberal feminist; Geert Wilders says he’s opposed to Islam because of its hostility to gay equality, whereas the usual rap against us far-right extremists is that we want the godless sodomites to roast in hell.

It’s not “ironic” that the most liberal country in western Europe should be the most advanced in its descent into a profoundly illiberal hell. It was entirely foreseeable. Geert Wilders is stating the obvious: a society that becomes more Muslim will have fewer gays. Last year, the Rainbow Palace, formerly Amsterdam’s most popular homo-hotel (relax, that’s the Dutch word for it), announced it was renaming itself the Sharm and reorienting itself to Islamic tourism. Or as the website allah.eu put it: “Gay Hotel Turns Muslim.” As a headline in the impeccably non-far-right Spiegel wondered: “How much Allah can the Old Continent bear?” It’s an interesting question, albeit if an increasingly verboten one. The Wilders show trial is important because it will determine whether the subject can be discussed openly by mainstream politicians and public figures, or whether it will be forced underground and manifest itself in more violent ways.

Yet, despite its significance, the trial has received relatively little coverage in the Western media, in part because, for those of a multiculti bent, there’s no easy way to blur the reality—that this is a political prosecution by a thought police so stupid they don’t realize they’re delegitimizing the very institutions of the state. Still, the BBC gave it their best shot, concluding their report thus: “Correspondents say his Freedom Party (PVV), which has nine MPs in the lower house of parliament, has built its popularity largely by tapping into the fear and resentment of Muslim immigrants.”

Gotcha. This democracy business is all very well, but let’s face it, the people are saps, gullible boobs, racist morons, knuckle-dragging f–kwits. One-man-one-vote is fine in theory, but next thing you know some slicker’s “tapping into” the morons’ “fears and resentments” and cleaning up at the polls.

Strange how it always comes back to a contempt for the people. Whenever the electorate departs from the elite’s pieties, whether in the Netherlands or in Massachusetts last month, it’s because some wily demagogue like, er, Scott Brown has been playing on the impressionable hicks’ “fears and resentments.” To the statist bullies at Canada’s “Human Rights” Commissions, their powers to regulate speech are necessary to prevent hate-mongers like me tapping into the fears and resentments of the Dominion’s millions of birdbrained boobs. Yes, that would be you, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Schmoe of 22 Dufferin Gardens. Sure, you’ve voted for the Liberals every year since Expo, but c’mon, in your heart you know even you might be…susceptible…impressionable.

In the old days—divine right of kings, rule by patrician nobility—it was easier. But today’s establishment is obliged to pay at least lip service to popular sovereignty. So it has to behave more artfully. You’ll still have your vote; it’s just that the guy you wanted to give it to is on trial, and his platform’s been criminalized.

To return to where we came in, what does it mean when the Ministry of Justice proudly declares that the truth is no defence? When the law stands in explicit opposition to the truth, freeborn peoples should stand in opposition to the law. Because, as the British commentator Pat Condell says, “When the truth is no defence, there is no defence”—and what we are witnessing is a heresy trial. The good news is that the Openbaar Ministerie is doing such a grand job with its pilot program of apostasy prosecutions you’ll barely notice when sharia is formally adopted.

Another Great Paul Solman Segment on the Financial Mess

Paul Solman interviews William Black, author of THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE: You can buy the book from Amazon.com at this link:

Professor Warned University About Alleged Killer's Mental State

According to this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the University of Alabama at Huntsville professor still fears for his safety:

Another professor, however, has long been wary of Ms. Bishop. He asked The Chronicle not to use his name because, considering recent events, he is worried about his own safety. The professor, who was a member of Ms. Bishop's tenure-review committee, said he first became concerned about Ms. Bishop's mental health "about five minutes after I met her."

The professor said that during a meeting of the tenure-review committee, he expressed his opinion that Ms. Bishop was "crazy." Word of what he said made it back to Ms. Bishop. In September, after her tenure denial, she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging gender discrimination. The professor's remark was going to be used as possible evidence in that case.

It was then, the professor said, that the associate provost of the university, John Severn, came to him and asked whether he truly believed what he had said about Ms. Bishop. (Reached by phone, Mr. Severn declined to comment.) The professor was given the opportunity to back off the claim, or to say it was a flippant remark. But he didn't. "I said she was crazy multiple times and I stand by that," the professor said. "This woman has a pattern of erratic behavior. She did things that weren't normal."

No one incident stands out, the professor said, but a series of interactions caused him to think she was "out of touch with reality." Once, he said, she "went ballistic" when a grant application being filed on her behalf was turned in late. The professor said he avoided Ms. Bishop whenever he saw her, on or off the campus. When he spotted her not long ago at a Barnes & Noble bookstore, he made sure he was out of sight until she had left the store. He even skipped a faculty retreat because he knew she would be there.

To be clear, it wasn't as if the professor told the university that he thought Ms. Bishop was potentially violent. And, at the time, the university was narrowly focused on the legal fallout from a possible lawsuit by Ms. Bishop, he said.

The Chronicle also republishes some responses, including this interesting observation from a psychoanalyst:

Prudence Gourguechon, president, American Psychoanalytic Association:
Every story in the media I've seen so far mentions the fact that she was recently denied tenure. This is an experience likely to lead to feelings of anger, humiliation, shame, and resentment in any human being. ...

These feelings, these life events, do not lead to mass murder.

This has become a habitual approach for the media in stories of this type. When Major Hasan killed 13 fellow service people at Fort Hood last November, the media reports focused obsessively on the stress of working with veterans returning from combat, Dr. Hasan's imminent deployment to Iraq and his opposition to the war, and burnout among military mental-health professionals. ...

Getting it wrong in the media does us all a disservice. If true but irrelevant facts are continually referenced, we start to think these things (e.g., stress) are relevant and truly causal, as opposed to possible triggers. And, the media rarely or never mention the factors that are more important to consider: Delusions. Paranoia. Major mental illness. Schizophrenia. Psychosis. The vast majority of human beings who suffer from these symptoms or disorders are not violent or dangerous and can do very well with appropriate treatment. But these might be the things that lead a few human beings pick up a gun and shoot their colleagues. That, plus easy availability of firearms.

Why have we substituted "stress" for psychosis as a causal concept? Why have we confused triggers for causes? What is the consequence for our society? One consequence I fear is that there will be a continually diminished tendency to consider and diagnose and treat psychosis and major mental illness, and therefore there will continue to be undiagnosed and untreated disordered minds picking up guns and going to a meeting to kill. (Psychoanalytic Excavation, Psychology Today)

NY Times Discovers BBC Radio Four Podcasts

We've been listening to BBC Radio Four podcasts for years (NOT the dreadful, politically correct, BBC World News paid for by the Foreign Office), so were delighted to see that they have finally been noticed by the NY Times. Today's editorial column by Adam Cohen mentioned a particularly interesting Melvyn Bragg In Our Time program about the siege of Muenster--the moral of which appeared to be that one way to convert fanatical militant religious terrorists into lovable pacifists is through a crushing military defeat (something Mr. Cohen failed to notice):

“In Our Time,” a program on “the history of ideas,” is in a class of its own. Each week the host, Melvyn Bragg — a BBC veteran, whose Life Peerage makes him Lord Bragg of Wigton — offers a panel of academic experts, with Oxford and Cambridge heavily represented. The guests have titles like “associate professor in philosophy and senior fellow in the public understanding of philosophy at the University of Warwick.” They talk about arcane topics from history, literature, science and philosophy, throwing off casual asides on subjects like Sigmund Freud’s theory of “gain through illness” — the idea that people become neurotic because it is useful to them.

Mr. Bragg doesn’t spare the stage directions: Would you please tell us about this? And We’ll Get to That Later. But his careful questioning and quick wit underlie the brilliance of “In Our Time” — its ability to draw in listeners on subjects that they would not expect themselves to care much about, or perhaps even to be able to tolerate.

I convinced a friend to start downloading the program when I mentioned an interesting discussion of logical positivism. The next time I saw her, she told me that she was hooked and that a new episode on the Siege of Munster — which had popped up on my iPhone, but which I had not rushed to hear — was surprisingly fascinating.

BTW, we also like Broadcasting House with Paddy O'Connell...

Uzbekistan's Successful Economic Development Plan

From Terry McKinley's study, published by the Center for Development Policy and Research at the School of Oriental and African Studies (UK) (ht BrettonWoodsProject.Org). Conclusion:

In general, Uzbekistan’s heterodox policies have served it fairly well. It was able to successfully moderate the hardships of its early transition, resume credible rates of economic growth by the late 1990s, and substantially restructure its economy to be more self-sufficient in such critical items as energy and food.

Its restructuring has enabled it to avoid some of the worst effects of the food and fuel crisis of mid-1998 and the global financial crisis and recession of 1998-1999. Aspects of Uzbekistan’s development model could certainly be criticized (see McKinley and Weeks 2009). Employment growth has consistently lagged behind economic growth and poverty reduction has been slow.

Yet by any standard barometers of economic performance—as well as by comparison with other low-income countries—Uzbekistan has been relatively successful over two decades of transition and development, though its achievements appear to remain a frustrating puzzle to many orthodox economists.