Blogging the democratic revolution
What do most Americans think of when they hear the terms “Middle East” or “Arab world”? Perhaps images of angry young men wearing green head bands, marching to their death, in the West Bank, or car bombs in Baghdad. Others might think of imposing sight of Saddam Hussein or Yasser Arafat; the more informed might imagine the image of Muamar al-Qaddafi, decked out in his flamboyant robes. Many might imagine impoverished beduins or angry mobs protesting against the Zionist Enemy as they carry placards as they advance down a beige boulevard in Cairo or Damascus. Few would imagine Rami Khoury,…
Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak recently ruffled feathers in the Arab world when he publically questioned the loyalty of Arab Shiites not only to the Arab nation, but also to their own homelands. “Most of the Shiites are loyal to Iran, and not the countries they are living in,” he said. Such fears in the Arab East are long standing and often taken in a very matter of fact way when the region????????s Sunnis look at their Shiite neighbors???????? affinity for portraits of Iranian political leaders and mosques built with Iranian funds. Suspicion among the region????????s various groups has only been…
Today is the 45th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs exile invasion of Cuba. Back in 1961, when John F. Kennedy was president, an organized group of Miami Cuban exiles trained as a brigade around Central America and elsewhere and tried to retake their island from the murderous regime of Fidel Castro during his first years in power. Castro in those early years first claimed he was a democrat, and then rapidly instituted an orgy of bloodshed, slamming 3,000 Cubans up against the wall as “enemies of the people” and shooting them dead, including many children, without trial or due…
Like a beautiful woman who’s unaware she’s beautiful, free trade is the unconscious crowning glory of the George Bush presidential administration. The US Trade Representative’s Office has about 200 staff and pound for pound, packs more value for us taxpayers and the work of our government than probably any other office. Its tiny staff negotiates these things, working hard 16-hour days. Amid the tons of paperwork, I’ve talked to them, and they always see the next mountain and hurdle. They talk of obstacles and frustrations. They don’t think they are any good, they worry ab out everything. They never quite…
Breaking News: Italy’s former Minister for Reforms, Calderoli, affirms today that if the Court of Cassation confirms the not irrelevant irregularities, the election outcome could change and the center-right could continue to govern. Please read this news here . “Not only are a lot of votes being contested, but so are the election irregularities and both could change the outcome. The latter are being contested because of what was on record and how it was transcribed. These particular irregularities, which have to be sniffed out, took place all over the country”. Calderoli continued, “I would like to give you an…
A common canard from the left is that Miami Cubans are crazed retrograde reactionaries, still pining for property they lost when the communist regime of Fidel Castro conducted wholesale expropriations against what was Cuba’s then-ample middle class in 1959. Anyone who knows Miami Cuban Americans knows that’s false. It’s a comic-book kind of stereotype, and has its origins in the Castro propaganda machines of Cuba themselves, which consider these fellow Cubans the implacable enemy. What’s interesting to speculate about is why it happened. Castroite communists, being materialists, and having materialism at the bedrock of their ideology, have a vulgar obsession…
Brave Cubans opened other more independent libraries. One was opened in Regla and the other in Havana; the latter was founded by the Cuban Liberal Movement. Below, some members of the Liberal Movement in Havana:
It started back in September 2005 when 18 children from the Chechen village of Staroshchedrinskaya were hospitalized with signs of poisoning, and then a month later 8 more children from the same school were hospitalized with the same symptoms. In December 2005 13 more children from the Chechen Shelkovskaya district were hospitalized with very similar symptoms. Since December more than 50 other children have developed the same symptoms, including children in the Chechen villages of Shelkozavodskaya and Starogladovskaya. The symptoms are fatigue, asphyxia, headaches, convulsions and hysteria. Some children also reported memory loss and hallucinations. All most all of the…
Ratko Mladic was the former Army Chief under Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. Along with Karadzic, Mladic is largely responsible for the campaign of ethnic cleansing of Croats and Muslims. Mladicwas indicted in 1995 by the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for genocide and crimes against humanity for his role in the siege of Sarajevo, which claimed 12,000 lives, and for orchestrating the massacre in July 1995 of more than 7,500 Muslims at Srebrenica. Mladic and Karadzic are the two most wanted suspects from the Bosnia conflict, and both are still on the run. When Slobodan Milosevic…
It has been a week now since the united Seven Party Alliance, together with the Maoists, called for a nationwide strike. It’s still going strong. The crowds of demonstrators are growing and the country is finding it hard to function. The government especially. Protests are going into their eighth day with all segments of the population participating. It’s no longer agitated students, journalists, and human rights activists. It’s businessmen and farmers and lawyers and teachers. Everyone. The regime of King Gyanendra has proven itself to be even more brutal than thought. Just in the past week alone, over three thousand…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has grand designs on the Caribbean. He considers it his swimming pool, and its tiny community of nations his pool-rafts; places where he can swirl his oily mixed drinks and get himself a back rub, made in the shade. Well, the Caribbean states don’t care for this, and today they gave a collective thump to Chavez by seeking a free trade pact as a group with the United States. With a hat tip to Boz, The Miami Herald has the item here. That’s got to be a blow for Chavez who has lavished millions of dollars…
Algeria handed over $35 million to the Palestinian Authority. I don’t know that I’ve heard of such a massive waste of money since they came out with that whole “pay as you go” cell phone system. The West has refused to keep throwing money at the PA. And because Palestine is oh so important, the Arabs must come to its aid. Yes, so important is Palestine in fact that the Algerian government needs to throw away money there while Algerians can hardly find proper housing or jobs. $35 million. Why not put that towards building these new housing units Boutef…
Nile Gardiner at the Heritage Foundation has an interesting piece about Prodi’s likely foreign policy: appeasement of terrorists and Middle Eastern tyrants; pro-EU and pro-U.N. policies at the expense of Italy’s alliance with the U.S. and Israel. Read the whole thing here.
Despite an increase in repression, the Cuban resistance movements are growing stronger and more popular than ever. In Isle of Pines, freedom fighters established a new Independent Library, named “January 28”.
This would be the first time that any party has managed to hold power for two terms. As previously discussed, the political parties don’t quite conform to typical expectations as understood in the US, nor even as they would be understood a hop, skip, and jump away in Italy. If you’re not familiar with the scene, you’ll want to hit the link and jog your memory. Results here are as follows: MSZP 43.21% FIDESZ 42.03% SZDSZ 6.50% MDF 5.04% This is a strong showing for the Free Democrats (SZDSZ – mild minarchists, sort of libertarian lite), and a truly unexpectedly…
Latvia will host the NATO summit in Riga this November. Latvia joined NATO and the EU in 2004. However, the NATO summit aside, things may get very interesting in Latvia this fall if the Mayor of Ventspils, Aivars Lembergs, decides to run for parliament in the national elections in October. The last few days have seen a small crisis in the Latvian government as several cabinet ministers resigned and there was no longer majority support for the Cabinet of Ministers. The crisis was put on hold when the government had an extraordinary meeting to approve seven new ministers that were…
Whatever will be the Supreme Court’s response after recounting the votes and regardless of how long will a likely Prodi’s government last, one thing is for sure: after 5 years of stable gov’t, Italy returns to political instability. In the last 60 years, Italy had 55 governments in 50 years. Prodi’s last administration changed prime minister for 3 times in 5 years. This is because his coalition – made up with communists, greens, moderate christian democrats and ‘former’ anti-globalization street protestors (people who incited communist mobs to throw molotov cocktails at police and shops, now will sit at the parliament!)…
OK, I have made a mistake. All is not lost for Peru’s best candidate, Lourdes Flores. She may still make the runoff. I misread one of Alvicho’s Off Topic posts on the electoral outcome. He had a headline up about the expat vote, but the tally he posted was for the Peruvian electorate as a whole, not just the expats. That’s why I thought the expats were going for Humala. They probably aren’t. Rici, posting a note at Fruits and Votes pointed this out to me. He says the expat vote is still expected to go mostly for Lourdes Flores…
Where were you on April 11, 2002? I was just getting on an airplane to Buenos Aires, Argentina to check out the crisis in that country. But I knew I would be flying over another nation – Venezuela – that was in an even more acute crisis, a military coup against Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez. I hated the guy even then and found myself pleased that it was his time to go. By the time I landed, I got out of the plane and heard the news that Chavez was back and the coup attempt against him had failed. I…
Miguel Buitrago at the excellent MABB blog, just got back from a conference in Turkey devoted to discussing world democracy movements. People from different countries got together and compared notes on the progress of democratic revolution. Miguel, who is from Bolivia, said that three other Bolivians also were there. Turkey’s prime minister attended along with about 700 delegates, from countries far and wide. What a fascinating conference that must be and what a great thing that it’s going on. See what Miguel’s got on his site about this here.
The expat vote is coming in, the last frontier of vote counting in Peru’s hotly contested election race. As it happens, the Peruvian expat vote pretty much reflects the vote of the home Peruvians – most are going to Ollanta Humala, with the second-highest tally going to Alan Garcia, and free-market Lourdes Flores is left with just slightly less vote than Garcia. What a shame. I am so sad for Peru. CORRECTION: Wrong information, see my update here. That means that come May, Peru will face a stark choice between a leftwing lunatic, Ollanta Humala who has dreams of being…
“Thought he died years ago.” That’s the remark my mother made this weekend when the topic of Fidel Castro was brought up for some reason or another and the conversation rapidly moved on to some other subject. Castro should have died years ago, of course, but that hasn’t happened. If he had any dignity, he’d at least have gone into retirement. That’s why a new post from David A. Einhorn has such resonance. Einhorn recently came back from a trip to Cuba and was not impressed with what he saw and heard. Castro, like Hugo Chavez, was constantly breaking into…
I noticed this photo on the Yahoo! site, listed as one of the most frequently viewed and emailed. It’s interesting because at my workplace, the photo editor was struck by the strangeness of the photo, too, and called me over to look at it as something disgusting. He pointed out that the hackneyed peace symbolism, the dictator-pleasing dance concept, and the scary topic – nuclear uranium – all combined to create a surprisingly Orwellian image. The phony joy of the lobotomized culties just happens to match the ayatollahs’ announcement of “happy news” about Iran’s new uranium enrichment program. Kim Jong…
Now here is something we have been waiting for, Alvaro Vargas Llosa’s take on the wretched electoral situation in Peru, where a leftist Chavista, Ollanta Humala, is in the lead. Vargas Llosa’s got a new essay out, released just minutes ago, called ‘Peru – A Fox Guarding The Henhouse.’ It’s a good neutral analysis of how the votes will likely go and what will likely happen as the electoral situation shapes up in Peru. Read it here.
I received an email from my friend Abu Khawla, coordinator of the Lafif Lakhdar International Defense Committee (Lakhdar is a Tunisian secularist and reformist who got a death fatwa by London-based imams). Below, I am reporting Khawla’s email as I received it. Hi friends I’m forwarding you a message I received from Professor Ikbal Gharbi-Zeitouna University in Tunis. It’s about the dramatic fate of a student of Al-Azhar University in Egypt. He was sacked for just writing an artic;le (in www.rezgar.com) entitled “Against the racist separation between boys and girls” shut down Al-Azhar” In his call (in Arabic, following Prof…