NO TO ISLAM


Gee, what did those Thai do to piss off the Religion of PeaceTM ?

The "Emergency Powers Law" replaces localised martial law already in place in the three southernmost provinces, where more than 800 people have died in the last 19 months. It brings responsibility for security directly into the PM's office.

"In the past seven days there have been signs that the situation will escalate," Deputy Prime Minister Wissanu Krea-ngam told reporters after an emergency cabinet meeting prompted by a coordinated set of attacks on Thursday evening in the provincial capital of Yala.

"The last straw that prompted us to impose this law is what happened at seven pm (1200 GMT) in Yala," he said.

In one of the most dramatic episodes of the southern unrest, suspected Muslim separatists set off a series of bombs, bringing down pylons outside electricity sub-stations and plunging the town into darkness for an hour. Two policeman were killed and 23 people injured in the ensuing chaos, as the militants went on a shooting spree in the normally quiet town of 30,000 people around 1,100 km (690 miles) south of Bangkok and near the Malaysian border. The violence continued on Friday, with a small bomb blast at 11.30 a.m. injuring four people in Yala, and unidentified gunmen shooting dead two teachers in neighboring Narathiwat province.

Mohammed Bouyeri, the murderer of Theo Van Gogh, is on trial. Detailed translations too at Cdr. Salamander.

"I can assure you that one day, should I be set free, I would do exactly the same, exactly the same," he said, speaking slowly in sometimes halted Dutch.

He said he felt an obligation to Van Gogh's mother Anneke, present in court, to speak, but offered no sympathy.

"I have to admit I do not feel for you, I do not feel your pain, I cannot -- I don't know what it is like to lose a child," he said as Van Gogh's family and friends looked on.

"I cannot feel for you ... because I believe you are an infidel," he added.

"I acted out of conviction -- not because I hated your son."

As usual, the Guardian is not exactly on the side of the victims of Islam, even if those victims are Brits themselves.

Shocked would be to suggest we didn't appreciate that when Falluja was flattened, the people under it were dead but not forgotten - long after we had moved on to reading more interesting headlines about the Olympics. It is not the done thing to make such comparisons, but Muslims on the street do. Some 2,749 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks. To discover the cost of "liberating" Iraqis you need to multiply that figure by eight, and still you will fall short of the estimated minimum of 22,787 civilian Iraqi casualties to date. But it's not cool to say this, now that London's skyline has also has plumed grey.

Shocked would also be to suggest that the bombings happened through no responsibility of our own. OK, the streets of London were filled with anti-war marchers, so why punish the average Londoner? But the argument that this was an essentially US-led war does not pass muster. In the Muslim world, the pond that divides Britain and America is a shallow one. And the same cry - why punish us? - is often heard from Iraqi mothers as the "collateral damage" increases daily

Perhaps now is the time to be honest with each other and to stop labelling the enemy with simplistic terms such as "young", "underprivileged", "undereducated" and perhaps even "fringe". The don't-rock-the-boat attitude of elders doesn't mean the agitation wanes; it means it builds till it can be contained no more.

Dilpazier Aslam, tha author of this piece of journalistic garbage, is a Guardian trainee journalist. Mr. Aslam happily types "The don't-rock-the-boat attitude of elders doesn't mean the agitation wanes; it means it builds till it can be contained no more." at the very moment that 30 meters under Londons streets, "rescue" crews recover maimed corpses from the wreckage of commuter trains. 7/7 is one week ago and the temperature in those tunnels is said to be 60 degrees Centigrade. I don't want to know what those corpses look like by now. But Mr. Aslam warns us the time of the don't rock the boat attitude is over.


Time to take the kid's gloves off. I'm done with smooth talking. This is about preservation of our civilization. They want war, they can get war. If you think that's rough, I say they will very likely get the point better.






MFBB