Blogging the democratic revolution
I hate Islamists. You know the deal. But if you don’t, it’s at the end of every news article about Algeria: “Algeria’s civil war between the military and Islamist militas began in 1992 after the military halted elections that the Islamist FIS was poised to win took over 150,000 lives . . . blah blah blah”. That’s why. Islamists come in many different forms though. Some are peaceful and practice a sort of social gospel. Others are irritable and beat women for not being covered. Others massacre entire villages. Still others advocate sectarianism and conflict between religious groups in countries…
It’s happening in three countries of the Americas, simultaneously at this very moment: Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba. In at least two of the three cases, Venezuela and Bolivia, there’s a rapidly building case for civil war as productive land owners seek to defend their life’s work from the Mugabization of it all into smoking ruins. Bloodshed will follow. Land wars are nothing new in Latin America but they haven’t happened in about two decades, so this is a negative new development powerfully signalling a spread of tyranny. In every land war, a dictator seeks to destroy the very concept of…
Nazanin, a 17-year-old Iranian girl, who was attacked by an Iranian rapist thug in a Tehran park as her weaselly, masculinity-challenged ‘boyfriend’ ran away, was left to defend herself with a small knife, and in the course of that act, accidentally killed the vile bastard, who is now in hell where he belongs. But that wasn’t enough for Iran’s mullahs. Showing the depth of their ethics, they insisted that SHE, the helpless teenager, was the real criminal, and Iranian society could simply not exist in its current form if Iranian rapists were not allowed to do as they wished to…
Twenty-four years ago, June 8, 1982, Ronald Reagan spoke to the British House of Commons. In that speech President Reagan said, in part, the following: We’re approaching the end of a bloody century plagued by a terrible political invention — totalitarianism. Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression. Yet optimism is in order because day by day democracy is proving itself to be a not at all fragile flower. From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have…
Turkish PM Tayyip Erdo????an visited Algeria this past week. Meeting with Algerian National Assembly Speaker Amar Saadani on Monday, Erdo????an met with president Bouteflika on Tuesday. After their three hour meeting, the two leaders announced an accord of “friendship and cooperation.” Erdo????an visited a veterans cemetery and the Algerian military museum, surveying artefacts from Algeria’s Ottoman period and praising Algeria’s veterans. “…..The heroes of the struggle for independence in Algeria are the best examples for today’s generations,” Erdo????an said. Erdo????an also made statements in relation to his county’s desired assencion into the European Union, sating that ???????If the EU is…
Glenn has found an important source on the doings in Syria, the benighted sub-Axis-Of-Evil tyranny. Intellectuals of all stripes are being rounded up by Syrian goons in the heaviest crackdown on dissidents in years. First in line for government oppression are those who have criticized the Syrian involvement in Lebanon. One by one, name by name, they are disappeared. It’s believed that the international lull in attention of Syria’s role in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri is what’s emboldened the tyrants. That underscores the need to turn the heat up on Syria over its murderous practices.…
The United Nations was not intended to prevent genocide in Darfur. It was not to swap oil-for-food, depose of rogue regimes seeking weapons of mass destruction, or fight avian flu. It has never had the means or accountability mechanisms available to do so. It was created by the victor powers of World War II ???????? Russia, China, France, Britain, and the United States ???????? with the sole purpose of maintaining stability and collective security. Global order was at the top of the agenda. Human rights may have received its rhetorical due, but ???????never again??????? proved to be empty in substance.…
President Bouteflika’s recent comments regarding the French colonization of Algeria have caused quite a stir. His fuss holds the potential to accomplish a great deed; placing such a burden on the world community’s conscience that they feel moved to take meaningful action in Darfur, or at least to make them seriously contemplate it. But it does not seem to be the case that Mr. Bouteflika, or any one else, is going to use this tremendous opportunity to do good. His comments have been a source of reflection for me over the past week or so. Firstly, I am inclined to…
Cuba has secured a spot on the new United Nations human rights council, the board that replaced a previous one, which was intended to keep countries like Zimbabwe and Burma off these boards. Cuba is the biggest human rights violator in the hemisphere. It is one of the few tyrannies in the world that refuses its citizens the right to leave, effectively turning it into an island prison. It has one of the world’s highest suicide rates. Its locals without party connections get no health care, and in fact are denied education if their parents are dissidents. Its residents are…
A fearless Peruvian democracy revolutionary, Maria Elena Moyano, may finally see her killer brought to justice. An arrest was made of the Shining Path Marxist terrorist who most likely did it 14 unpunished years ago this afternoon in Peru. I wrote about her case about a year ago here. Source: Peru Hilfe Moyano was a Peruvian community leader in a poor slum who organized to get the poor included into the system too. Instead of out in guerrillaville. The Shining Path hated her intensely for it, threatened her, tried to kill her, and eventually killed her. There’s a big difference…
Yesterday, while we were having lunch or dinner or driving to work or whatever our peaceful pursuits may be, Fidel Castro’s barbarians assaulted Martha Beatriz Roque, the leading Cuban freedom fighter in an ‘act of repudiation.’ This is nothing more than to say a gang assault sanctioned by the state. Radio Mambi in Miami said she was on the phone with them yesterday when it happened, and the Cuban American Foundation has the transcript of what happened, as Martha Beatriz told it here. She said (sorry no time to translate but will later): “…me han dado tantos golpes, me han…
We always knew there was something wrong with Prime Minister Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and today that missing link got just a little bit more primal. Turns out his idea of democratic revolution is equal rights for apes under the law. That’s right, Zapatero’s gone ape for ape rights, and given that he’s lost the confidence of his human supporters one can probably surmise that he wants to empower a newer and far more loyal core constituency that sees things as he does. Here are the monkeyshines: The Great Ape Project is founded upon the genetic similarity between great apes –…
Peru’s detested spy chief, Vladimir Montesinos, who committed numerous human rights violations in the 1990s, is a man who belongs in jail. He’s there all right, but his networks of operatives are not. Instead, the unemployed spies and torturers have found a new sponsorship in the candidacy of Ollanta Humala. That tells us a lot about the kind of regime Humala is likely to institute, given that he intends to rewrite the constitution to consolidate power. Alek Boyd has the ominous report here.
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…
Liberian ex-dictator and accused mass murderer Charles G. Taylor Source: AFP, via Yahoo! One of the continent’s grisliest mass murderers, Liberia’s ex-dictator Charles G. Taylor, was apprehended in northeastern Nigeria yesterday and shipped back to face justice in a Sierra Leone court run by United Nations prosecutors. He’s charged with 17 counts of crimes against humanity. The UN had made a resolution that Liberia put the thug on trial a couple years ago, and President Bush, meeting with his Nigerian counterpart this week, put a lot of diplomatic muscle into making sure that happened. That’s to his credit because this…
Abdul Rahman, the Afghan convert who risked death for ‘apostasy’, has been granted political asylum in Italy, where he arrived overnight. It would be great if he might be able to get in touch with us Italian activists once he’ll be living over here with the due protection. In the meantime, and totally off topic, I’d like you to read my op-ed at Tech Central Station, regarding the Italian election, which is just less than two-weeks away.
A very brave independent Cuban journalist is on his 57th day of a hunger strike for the right to Internet access in Cuba. Guillermo Farinas Hernandez’s case has gotten little media attention, but it’s an important struggle for freedom of information inside news-starved Cuba. Castro knows very well the power of the Internet and its challenge to his brutal and increasingly tattered dictatorship. That’s why he’s repressing the brave ones who dare challenge his rule … not with guns, but with a hunger strike for free information. Guillermo’s, now in its 57th day, is showing no signs of stopping. To…
It was sometime in the 1970s. I was a kid in a public school in Southern California. I had to report a news article in front of my class on that day. My mother in her bathrobe and coffee that morning picked out the article and cut it out for me. I read it. I did not like it. Some blonde lady named Isabel Peron, had lost her position as president, in some country called Argentina. I had only heard of the country earlier by watching the Miss Universe pageant. But wow, a woman president! Except that she sounded incompetent…
Here is the press release of a project that I’ve been working on with a bunch of great guys at the Hamsa Project and Harvard University. It’s a concert that we’re hoping will draw a few hundred people, featuring local bands, that we’re also hoping will highlight human rights abuses in Iran. Please check it out if you can, and maybe I’ll see you there if I can get back from Honduras in time! ***** CAMBRIDGE ???????? On Saturday, March 18, Harvard University will host the Iran Freedom Concert, a rally organized by Harvard students to support their counterparts in…
Belarus goes to the polls on March 19 to elect a president. All indication shows that the incumbent, Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko, will win reelection by way of genuine popularity and repression against the population. Lukashenko was first elected in 1994 on a vague populist platform which gave him 80 percent of the vote in a fair election. Beginning in 1996, he used a combination of legislative moves and repression to solidify his power. NGOs, human rights organizations, oppostition parties and civil society groups are all under a stiff arm of real or threatened repression. Belarus is now considered by many…
(Disclaimer: I’m in a heavy-OT zone today, and do not have the time to write this up with the care that it deserves, but the issue needs to be raised, because the “common wisdom” is beginning to accrete in a dangerous direction.) Bosnia has brought up Serbia on war crimes. Yes, the entire nation. This has never been done before, and there’s a good reason for that: the Allies didn’t hang the entire population of Germany for war crimes after World War II, the entire Serbian nation didn’t somehow wake up one morning and think “let’s go murder all the…
After so many complaints that the United Nations Human Rights Commission is host to some of the most abusive human rights violators on the planet, one would think that the United States is being hypocritical by opposing planned reform at the UN for scrapping it and creating a new Human Rights Council that’s more effective in dealing with these issues. That’s what you’d think if you only read the headline and first paragraph of this Guardian Unlimited article, anyway. U.S. Against Proposed U.N. Rights Panel UNITED NATIONS (AP) – The United States announced its opposition to the proposed new U.N.…
Why? Find out more here . And remember, the Bahamian authorities behave as badly as Castro. How long will it take before the civilized world realizes that Cuban refugees deserve the status of political refugees and must be granted political asylum? I am endorsing the boycott.
The setup seems so marvelous, the U.S. bipartisan congressional National Endowment for Democracy gives funds to many nongovernment organizations around the world to spread democratic revolution. But what happens when the grants blows up in the recipients’ faces? Such as Venezuela, where Maria Corina Machado is facing charges for taking the money? Does anyone look out for her? Places, like Venezuela, that SAY they are democracies aren’t necessarily that. Here is one editorial that calls for taking more responsibility for the democracy-spreading recipients of these grants here.
A one-man Venezuelan court demanded 16 years in prison for Venezuelan democracy campaigner Maria Corina Machado. The one-stop-judge/jury/jailer also violated her rights by refusing to allow her to speak in the courtroom as is her right. The jail sentence he’s demanding is much higher than anyone expected. The politicized judge also demanded to detain her — in an abysmal Venezuelan prison — when she returns to court on Feb. 14. This doesn’t look good. Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is desperately looking for enemies and his actions have begun to sharply escalate as the U.S. becomes preoccupied with Iran, Castro totters…