Peace and Blessings Everyone Saad Gaya’s bail hearing date has changed to April21-08; 9:00am till 12:00pm. The location is the same: Brampton Court House’ 7755 Hurontario Street, Mississauga, ON. Please show up to show some support inshaAllah.
April 10, 2008
China orders Tibetans ‘reeducated’ about Dalai Lama
I think the people of Tibet should be given their own land if they are demanding it so bad. I don’t think China has a right to pressure the Tibetans to stay as part of China. Just my 2 cents.
This article reminds me of the plight of the Africans. When the Europeans didn’t understand the ways of the Africans, they called them ignorant and sought to re-educate them in their own ways. “Education” as a means of exchanging viewpoints is good; but “re-education” so as to make people forget about their identity and heritage and to boast about one’s strenghts is bad. It doesn’t help anyone because it leads to oppression and exploitation of the people. I mean each nation is different and have different things to offer to mankind as a whole. Tell me what kind of world we would have today if the Europeans, instead of exploiting the lands of Africans, sat and learned from them the way to “healing and understanding the world”. Perhaps, then we wouldn’t be going through this ridiculous “global warming”. You know one theme of “Heart of Darkness (HOD)” by Joseph Conrad was that power corrupts. After examining the novel in more detail, its easy to figure out why: “1-considering oneself superior than others; 2-Forgetting about being humble; 3-attempting to rule the weak by force; 4-exploiting the weak; 5-”re-educating” to brainwash only”. Its funny how reality and fiction interact. If the antagonist of HOD would not have submitted to his lust for power and control, he would not have gotten all rotten up from inside. Tell me who cared for him when he died? No one except for one person who looked into his eyes to understand what he went through as he screamed “the horror, the horror”. Here he refers to the horror of his own soul. If we, the people of this world, really wish to help each other out, we have to start analyzing our own souls before we go around correcting and reprimending others- a point many of us forget as we seek fame, fortune, control and power instead of love, care, understanding and knowledge.
China orders Tibetans ‘reeducated’ about Dalai Lam
Class materials denounce exiled leader as a reactionary. The effort may have incited some recent unrest.By Barbara Demick
Los Angeles Times Staff WriterApril 8, 2008
BEIJING — In an effort to quell unrest, Communist Party officials are ordering Tibetans back to school.
Buddhist monks, civil servants and public school students have been instructed to attend special classes in the virtues of Chinese rule and the evils of their exiled leader, the Dalai Lama. In these classes, the Tibetans read and recite from texts that denounce the Dalai Lama as a “political reactionary” and a “betrayer of the motherland.”
Ideological training is an enduring feature of Communist life, but has taken a back seat in a country consumed with more modern pursuits, such as making money. But in Tibetan areas, the Communist Party is pursuing “patriotic education” with new zeal.
But the campaign may be backfiring.
Clashes that erupted last week in Sichuan province’s Ganzi prefecture (known as Kardze to Tibetans) were reportedly triggered when the head of the Tongkor Monastery objected to Communist Party teaching materials that criticize the Dalai Lama. Tibetan activists say eight people were killed in the April 3 incident.
Nevertheless, Communist officials insist that the program be expanded.
Touring a monastery last week, the deputy Communist Party chief for Tibet, Hao Peng, called for strengthening “patriotic education so as to guide the masses of monks to continuously display the patriotic tradition.”
Besides the monks, Tibetan civil servants, party members and schoolchildren have attended special reeducation sessions, according to the Tibet Daily. At an elementary school, children viewed photographs of stores damaged in March 14 riots in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, and sang patriotic songs.
“If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed those bad guys were so abhorrent,” the newspaper quoted a third-grader as saying.
In a Tibetan village, an elderly party member was reported to have shouted criticism of what officials call the “Dalai clique” during an education session: “They are going to plunge us once again into the abyss of suffering. Their methods are despicable and cruel.”
Tibet experts say the rhetoric harks back to the reeducation and self-criticism campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s, but is unlikely to be successful today.
“Getting people to denounce the Dalai Lama or to recite ideological statements shows a lack of imagination on the part of the Communist Party. There is no way they can force people into what they say is the correct way of thinking,” said Ronald Schwartz, a Canadian scholar.
Schwartz and more than 200 other Tibet experts have signed an online petition calling for the Chinese government to negotiate over Tibetans’ grievances, but he says he is not optimistic.
“Patriotic education” is one of the Tibetans’ major grievances against Chinese rule. The Communist Party intrudes into the minutiae of religious life, dictating which deities can be worshiped, what clothing can be worn, and the procedures for reincarnation — a core belief in Tibetan Buddhism.
“Patriotic education is a euphemism for brainwashing,” said Chukora Tsering Agloe, a researcher at the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy.
Most provocative to Tibetans are the denunciations of the Dalai Lama. The 72-year-old monk and Nobel peace laureate is revered by Tibetan Buddhists as a deity; statements against him are considered blasphemous.
Monks who refuse to speak out against the Dalai Lama in patriotic education sessions are usually expelled from the monastery and sometimes are arrested. Last month, two monks were reported by Tibetan activists to have committed suicide because of the pressure.
Many of the recent demonstrations have been triggered by Chinese authorities’ attempts to confiscate banned photographs of the man Tibetans refer to simply as “his holiness.”
Teaching materials reveal the extent to which the Communist Party feels threatened by the Dalai Lama. Although the Dalai Lama has stated repeatedly that he favors more autonomy for Tibet rather than independence, teaching materials accuse him of being a pawn of “Western capitalists” who want to break up China.
“His aim is to cause chaos and split the motherland, to struggle in competition with us to control the minds of the people,” reads a pocket-sized pamphlet published in 1997.
Another text from 2002 describes the relationship between China and Tibet dating back to the 6th and 7th centuries when Tibetan kings were married to Tang dynasty princesses.
“It is clear that the Tibet region has had close relations with the motherland throughout its history,” it says.
The booklet (titled “Handbook for Education in Anti-Splittism”) goes on to describe how Chinese Communist rule lifted Tibetans out of feudalism and predicts a rosy future:
“The 1.3 billion children of China are striving without rest toward a renaissance of all China’s nationalities and one of the most glorious epochs in our 5,000-year history beckons.”
CIA is Secretly Transporting Prisoners to Foreign Prisons
I read this kind of news so many times. I don’t think its the first time that something like this has been reported. You know they actually transfer the prisoners from detention camps like Guantanom Bay and Abu-Gahrib to international prisons in countries like Jordan, Egypt etc. Oh, Abu-Gharib has been closed and prisoners have been released! Another one of those media shams! What about the ones that have been secretly sent to other prisons…what about their rights? This is nothing different than what Hitler did during WW2. What Muslims are going through now is nothing different than the Holocaust Jews went through. Have we learned nothing from history?
Let’s say a different president is elected in America. What does he/she has to promise for all these people who have been detained illegaly in different prisons? Nobody has addressed this issue. One of the most promising presidential candidates, Obama Barack does talk abut the Iraq war but he doesn’t say anything about this issue, does he? I think its upto the American people as well as the Internaional audience to knock some sense into whoever gets elected next. Seriously, how can America “liberate” anyone, when her own people are “slaves to the media, politics, financial system and the so-called democracy” ; and when she “enslaves” innocents from other countries. This is like the biggest scam anyone can ever fall for. I just wish and pray that God opens the eyes of the PEOPLE before its too late inshaAllah. Let’s strive for a world where we can open a newspaper without having to read anything about war, murder, rape etc. InshaAllah.
CIA “sent prisoners to Jordan”
The CIA secretly transferred at least 14 ’war on terror’ suspects to Jordan for interrogation and torture, a leading rights group says.
Human Rights Watch, based in New York, said Jordan, one of the US’s key allies in the Middle East, held prisoners and carried out interrogations on behalf of the CIA until at least 2004.
Some of the suspects are said to have ended up in
the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay [EPA]“While a handful of countries received persons rendered by the United States during this period, no other country is believed to have held as many as Jordan,” the group said in a press release.
However Nasser Judeh, Jordan’s information minister, said the findings were “baseless and untrue,” state media reported.
Judeh said that groups involved in attacks were attempting to defame Jordan by providing “fabricated information which could reach human rights organisations.”
Under the CIA rendition program, suspects were flown from one country to another, usually in secrecy, without the benefit of open legal proceedings.
US officials have acknowledged flying around 150 suspects from one country to another, but say they received diplomatic assurances from foreign authorities torture would not be used on the detainees.
‘Abusive interrogation’
The group said Jordan commonly tortured suspects by given them extended beatings on the soles of their feet.
“The Bush administration claims that it has not transferred people to foreign custody for abusive interrogation,” said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism director at Human Rights Watch. “But we’ve documented more than a dozen cases in which prisoners were sent to Jordan for torture.”
It said at least five Yemenis, three Algerians, two Saudis, a Mauritanian, a Syrian, a Tunisian, and one or more Chechens from Russia were rendered to Jordan.
Five of the men who had been sent to Jordan are now in US custody in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, it added.
Inquiry urged
One part of the report details a note written by a rendered prisoner - reportedly since transferred to the Guantanamo Bay – while in Jordanian custody in late 2002 which refers to his ill treatment.
Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi wrote that GID interrogators beat him “in a way that does not know any limits”.
“They threatened me with electricity, with snakes and dogs … [They said] we’ll make you see death … They threatened to rape me,” it said The group urged the US government to discontinue the CIA’s rendition program and urged Jordan to open an inquiry into its intelligence department’s alleged use of torture and ill-treatment.
Human Rights Watch said its report was based on first hand information from former Jordanian prisoners who had been detained with the non-Jordanian terrorism suspects.
Another Example of Mass Media Manupilation
Holy wow! I mean this is so ridiculous but what one can one expect. I totally bought the story when I saw it on TV and actually started thinking that the Iraqis brought down the statue; its the same thing when they brought some so-called “prisoners of war”, shackled like animals, kept untidy, uncared for–totally dehumanized. An average person would see it on TV and think that they were shackled because they were dangerous. A trained eye would see right through the propoganda.
Well, you can’t quite blame people for buying the story. Its quite easy to get sucked into the propoganda. I mean what do we know about these “prisoners of war” really? They could be young teenagers just picked up from the street, coerced into false confessions. Nobody in their right minds would trust this administration any further. My next question is whom can we really trust? If I were to choose between politicians and people, I would choose to trust the people.
The photographs tell the story…
Is This Media manipulation on a grand scale?
Updated: 04/15/03
New pictures of ” crowd” in the square: Picture 1 Picture 2 Picture 3 Picture 4
Yes, the occupation has begun.
See Also: A tale of two photos
04/10/03
April 6th: Iraqi National Congress founder, Ahmed Chalabi is flown into the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah by the Pentagon. Chalabi, along with 700 fighters of his “Free Iraqi Forces” are airlifted aboard four massive C17 military transport planes. Chalabi and the INC are Washington favorites to head the new Iraqi government. A photograph is taken of Chalabi and members of his Free Iraqi Forces militia as they arrive in Nasiriyah.
April 9th: One of the “most memorable images of the war” is created when U.S. troops pull down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Fardus Square. Oddly enough… a photograph is taken of a man who bears an uncanny resemblance to one of Chalabi’s militia members… he is near Fardus Square to greet the Marines. How many members of the pro-American Free Iraqi Forces were in and around Fardus Square as the statue of Saddam came tumbling down?
The up close action video of the statue being destroyed is broadcast around the world as proof of a massive uprising. Still photos grabbed off of Reuters show a long-shot view of Fardus Square… it’s empty save for the U.S. Marines, the International Press, and a small handful of Iraqis. There are no more than 200 people in the square at best. The Marines have the square sealed off and guarded by tanks. A U.S. mechanized vehicle is used to pull the statue of Saddam from it’s base. The entire event is being hailed as an equivalent of the Berlin Wall falling… but even a quick glance of the long-shot photo shows something more akin to a carefully constructed media event tailored for the television cameras.
