The War of Words and Drawings Keeps Hanging On As French satire magazine ‘Charlie Hebdo’ office firebombed over guess what?

War of words over hate speech heating up DECEMBER 7, 2008

In the war of words over free speech, it seems one of the early combatants has switched sides.

Calgary Imam Syed Soharwardy said attacks on Canadian or American soil are essentially attacks on Muslims. (Larry MacDougal/Canadian Press)

Imam Syed Soharwardy is opening a Freedom of Speech Centre in Calgary – a place where he says people will be encouraged to openly discuss thorny cultural issues of the day.

It’s a new twist for the man who helped spark a national uproar two years ago over the role of human rights commissions in censoring hate speech.That debate’s still raging, and it’s a nasty one.

Conservative pundits and a growing number of major media outlets have turned on the commissions, saying they risk becoming kangaroo courts where special interest groups can bully the media and jeopardize Canadians’ freedom of speech.

On the other side, there are calls to preserve what advocates insist is a needed tool in the battle against hate speech – and a way to hold mainstream media outlets to account for biased journalism.

Soharwardy fired an early salvo in the battle, lodging a human rights complaint against publisher Ezra Levant. In February 2006, Levant published the notorious Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in the now-defunct Western Standard magazine.

Ezra Levant, publisher of the now-defunct Western Standard magazine.

At the time, Soharwardy argued the cartoons were a form of hate speech.

However, the leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada has been through a lot since then. You might say he’s had a change of heart about hate.

“My view of the human rights commission has changed almost 180 degrees,” he told Canwest News Service. “Especially about this Section 13, the freedom of speech.”

Soharwardy backed out of the complaint against Levant, which was eventually dismissed by Alberta’s human rights commission, and has renounced the process.

“I wish we could have sat down at that time and talked it out rather than me going to a human rights complaint and Mr. Levant writing about me in the media and on the website,” Soharwardy says. “I think it would have helped us both.”

He says he hopes his planned Freedom of Speech Centre can help Muslims and all Canadians explore ways to balance hate speech and free speech.

He said he wants to help Muslims newly arrived from more repressive cultures to understand why, for example, Canadians can freely mock religions – and why that right to offend is an important pillar of democracy.

. . . a caricature of Mohammed   NOVEMBER 2, 2011

A gasoline bomb attack burned down the offices of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo Wednesday after it portrayed the Prophet Mohammed on its front page and named him “guest editor”.
http://www.france24.com/fr/20111102-france-medias-redaction-charlie-hebdo-incendie-criminel-elections-tunisie-charia-satire  < < < video

The arson attack was denounced across the French political spectrum as an assault on freedom of expression.  The fiercely anticlerical magazine said the move was intended to “celebrate” the victory of Islamist party Ennhada in Tunisia’s election, and the inclusion of Shariah in the Libyan constitution.

It’s editor-in-chief, Stephane Charbonnier, known as Charb, said: “We no longer have a newspaper. All our equipment has been destroyed.”

No one was hurt in the blaze, believed to have been started by two Molotov cocktails thrown at the paper’s headquarters in Paris’s 20th arrondissement overnight. Computers used to design the paper and digital archives were destroyed. Windows shattered in the heat and charred boxes were piled up outside the offices yesterday, with police guarding the entrance.

The magazine’s website was also hacked overnight, with the welcome page replaced by a picture of Mecca full of pilgrims and the words: “No god but Allah”. Charlie Hedbo has taken up temporary quarters at the Liberation newspaper’s offices.

“We will do everything possible to put a paper next week. There is no question of giving in to Islamists,” said Mr Charbonnier, who noted that the attackers could not have read the offending magazine. “Nobody knows what’s in it except those who bought it this morning, that’s what’s most abhorrent and stupid.” Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the prophet on the premise it could lead to idolatry.

The cover of this week’s issue, out Wednesday, depicts Mohammed saying: “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter.” A back page cartoon shows a bearded prophet with a red nose and the caption: “Yes, Islam is compatible with humour.”  The magazine is also mockingly renamed “Charia Hebdo” – a pun on Islamic Shariah law.More

‘Islamist fanatics challenge European freedom of speech’

Charlie Hebdo has been targeted by “fanatics who don’t accept critics of their religion,” claims Soren Espersen, deputy speaker of the Danish parliament.

The office of the French satirical newspaper was firebombed after it named Prophet Mohammed its editor-in-chief for the week.

The newspaper has come up with rather a provocative agenda, but Espersen, who is also an MP from the Danish People’s Party, believes that the really provocative thing was in fact “inviting thousands, millions of people from the Third World into Europe and creating new societies.”

The incident with the attack at the newspaper office was more about religious intolerance, Espersen believes.

“It is a question of the fanatic Islamists wanting to decide what can be said, what can be written and what can be drawn. In that way they are challenging our freedom of speech,” he said.

That is, the deputy Parliament speaker says, “one of the most cherished freedoms that we have at all,” so Europe“should not accept this by any chance.”

Why would they think Rwandan President Kagame; Could Be Sued In U.S.Courts?

OKLAHOMA CITY — A federal judge in Oklahoma has dismissed a lawsuit against Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

U.S. District Judge Lee R. West ruled last week that as a foreign head of state, Kagame is immune to the lawsuit, which accuses him of ordering a plane that was carrying the presidents of two African nations to be shot down in 1994 in Rwanda.

[2008] The Great Rwanda “Genocide Coverup” by Prof. Peter Erlinder   recently issued French and Spanish international “war-crimes” warrants and new evidence at the UN Rwanda Tribunal have exposed Kagame as the war-criminal who actually touched-off the 1994 “Rwanda Genocide” by assassinating the previous President and who is benefiting from a decades-long U.S.-sponsored “cover-up” of Pentagon complicity in massacres committed by Kagame’s regime, which even Britain’s Economist has called “the most repressive in Africa.”

QuotesIn fact, it is known that Museveni’s half-brother, Salim Saleh, was at the final RPF meeting in Mulindi where the date for the shoot-down was set. The attack on the plane killed the Rwandan president, Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, the Burundian president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, a Hutu, the Rwandan Army chief of staff, Deogratias Nsabimana, a Hutu, and everyone else on-board.
It was the first massacre of 1994, and it was a massacre of Hutus by the RPF. The RPF then immediately launched attacks across Kigali and throughout the north of the country. In the sector of Kigali known as Remera, they killed everyone living there on the night of the 6th/7th, wiped out the Gendarme camp there, wiped out the military police camp at Kami, and launched a major attack against Camp Kanombe, Camp Kigali and the main Gendarme camp at Kacyiru. They slaughtered everyone in their path. [2010] THE TRUTH ABOUT RWANDA by Christopher Black

  As we have already suggested, the established perpetrator-victim line requires suppression of the crucial fact that the April 6 shooting-down of the government jet returning Rwanda President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundi President Cyprian Ntaryamira to Kigali, that killed everyone onboard, was carried out by RPF commandos (as discussed below), and had been regarded by RPF planners as an essential first strike in its final assault on the government. Although the mass killings followed this assassination, with the RPF rapidly defeating any military resistance by the successor to Habyarimana’s coalition government and establishing its rule in Rwanda, these primegénocidaires were, and still are today, portrayed as heroic defenders of Rwanda’s national unity against Hutu “extremists” and the Interahamwe militia, who were the RPF’s actual victims. more

The widows of former Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira filed the suit in Oklahoma last year while Kagame was in town for a keynote address at a university there.

Kagame has denied any involvement in the 1994 Rwanda crash. One of his attorneys, Pierre-Richard Prosper, said he’s pleased with the judge’s decision.

U.S. diplomats and intelligence identified who was perpetrating the killing in Rwanda on the second day of the genocide, according to recently declassified documents posted to the Web today by the National Security Archive to mark the 10th anniversary of the start of the genocide. The documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Archive consulting fellow William Ferroggiaro identify the elite Presidential Guard as perpetrators both of the shoot-down of the Rwandan president’s plane and the targeted killings that laid the basis for the ensuing slaughter of an estimated 800,000 Rwandans from April through July 1994. The documents reveal CIA’s report to top officials on day two of the crisis identified the “Presidential Guard, gendarmerie, and military” as killers of “several government officials-including the Prime Minister”; State Department intelligence informed policymakers the morning after the shoot-down of the plane that “rogue Hutu elements of the military-possibly the elite presidential guard” were probable culprits; The U.S. defense attaché in Rwanda, who reported to State Department, defense intelligence and U.S. European Command officials, on the second day forwarded “reports that the Presidential Guard is “out of control” on the streets of Kigali while all other military units remain in their barracks”.more

Around 8 PM local time on the evening of April 6th, 1994 the plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi was shot down over Kigali, Rwanda as the presidents returned from a summit of regional leaders in Tanzania. Both men died, as did their senior aides and the French aircrew. Within hours, the Presidential Guard was out on the streets setting up roadblocks in Kigali and going house-to-house to find and attack prominent Rwandan opposition leaders and Tutsi civilians.

As Lt. Gen. Dallaire, the UN commander in Rwanda, recalls “In just a few hours, the Presidential Guard had conducted an obviously well-organized and well-executed plan-by noon on April 7 the moderate political leadership of Rwanda was dead or in hiding, the potential for a future moderate government utterly lost.” (Note 1)

The genocide in Rwanda had begun.

The judge also ruled that the widows’ attorneys never properly served notice to Kagame when he was in town for the commencement speech at Oklahoma Christian University.

Attorneys for the widows who filed suit planned to appeal the judge’s decision.

Peter Erlinder, the director of the International Humanitarian Law Institute at William Mitchell College of Law who has been working on the case, contends Kagame was a rebel Army leader at the time of the killings and has no claim to immunity.

“We think it’s just completely wrong that he could have any immunity at all, because these killings took place before he was president of Rwanda and before he was in any government at all,” Erlinder said. “And the Supreme Court has already explained that in that sort of situation, you can’t have immunity.”more

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2010

Bill Clinton's Rwanda Guilt

By Dana Godstein in The Daily Beast
Paul Kagame helped rebuild after genocide, but he has also brutally repressed political opposition in his country. Dana Goldstein on why Clinton is still protecting the Rwandanpresident.
While the Rwandan president is celebrated for rebuilding his country after its horrific genocide, over the past year he has brutally suppressed his political opposition, arresting presidential rivals and censoring journalists. This month, a leaked U.N. report accused Kagame’s militias of murdering and raping thousands of members of the Hutu ethnic group who fled over the border to Congo in the late 1990s.
Yet here at the Clinton Global Initiative, Kagame has one very powerful defender: Bill Clinton himself. At last year’s CGI conference, Clinton presented Kagame with a Global Citizen Award. At this year's event, he is promoting Rwanda's success in expanding rural health care and aid to family farmers.
Paul Kagame & Bill Clinton (AP Photo 2) Kagame has denied the accusations against him. When I asked Clinton Monday evening whether the world community should hold Kagame accountable for the violence and political suppression, he equivocated.
“The U.N. said what it did about what happened after the [Rwandan] genocide, in Congo. … Kagame strongly disputes it,” Clinton said. “Right now I’m not going to pre-judge him because there’s this huge debate about what happened in the Congo and why, and I don’t know.”

http://greatlakesdemocracy.blogspot.com/2010_11_01_archive.html

So POTUS Why Are You Sending U.S. Troops To Uganda-Africa Again? Is This Going To Turn Into Another 'Blackhawk Down' or Another Seek and Find ?

LRA Joseph Kony

TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT

President Barack Obama has decided to send 100 Special Forces troops to the Heart of Darkness in order to defeat evil. That, at any rate, is how critics of the president’s decision to help the Ugandan army track down Joseph Kony and his gang of psychotic murderers known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) have described the undertaking. As Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat, put it at a congressional hearing earlier this week, “What is the strategic interest of the United States in doing this? I mean, there are lots of unpleasant people in the world…. The United States obviously cannot try to dethrone every one of them.”

 A senior administration official blandly reassured me that the troop commitment constitutes the same “capacity-building” efforts the Pentagon has undertaken elsewhere in Africa, and even offers “a unique opportunity for our guys to train” — in a vast, trackless jungle in pursuit of maybe 250 lunatics. Assistant Secretary of Defense Alexander Vershbow told Congress that “it is in the interest of the United States to lend our support to partners in Africa so they can address threats to their citizens and help achieve the conditions necessary for regional security and broad-based development.”

Well, come on. This is not a training exercise, and the deaths of literally millions of civilians in central Africa over the last 15 years has had little discernible impact on American national security. In fact, the President has dispatched troops to the jungle and mountains of northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and southwestern Central African Republic (CAR) to fight evil — and he should be congratulated for it. The moral case for action against the LRA is much stronger than, say, the case for joining the NATO bombardment of Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Libya. No less important, the Obama White House, State Department, and Pentagon have designed a complex and sophisticated approach that seems to have a real chance at bringing the LRA to book.

The United States Army in Somalia
1992-1994

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The body of a dead US soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. [Source: History Channel

Americans consider themselves to be a compassionate people, and the United States Army has a long tradition of humanitarian relief operations both within and outside the continental United States. Never has this humanitarian impulse proven more dangerous to follow than in 1992 when the United States intervened to arrest famine in the midst of an ongoing civil war in the east African country of Somalia. Ultimately hundreds of thousands were saved from starvation, but unintended involvement in Somali civil strife cost the lives of thirty American soldiers, four marines, and eight Air Force personnel and created the impression of chaos and disaster. How could a mission that had accomplished so much have ended in such unhappy circumstances?

The LRA stands out even among the amoral hierarchy of the bandits and self-styled insurgents who roam Africa’s Great Lakes area. Despite its “Christian” rhetoric, the group has no program save for killing and raping, and abducting children as slaves and soldiers; atrocities, that is, are not the means to some programmatic end, no matter how ugly, but the end itself. The group’s top leaders, including their apparently charismatic supremo, Kony, were indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in 2005, but have eluded capture. The United States has targeted them before. In late 2008, the George W. Bush White House provided crucial intelligence support for Operation Lightning Thunder, a Ugandan campaign to attack LRA forces by air and ground. The mission was a complete fiasco: Kony smelled out the attack and fled, and the Ugandans failed to get the support of their neighbors in Congo and South Sudan, while keeping U.N. forces completely in the dark. The LRA scattered throughout the region and proceeded to carry out a series of gruesome killings as retribution for the invasion.

Operation Lightning Thunder was a ham-fisted response to a very complicated problem. In an April 2010 report, the International Crisis Group suggested that any future U.S. attempt to rout the LRA should focus on “civilian protection” rather than just hot pursuit, and proposed that the United States send a team to the battlefield to coordinate intelligence from armies throughout the region and help the Ugandans put their soldiers where the bad guys are.

The NY Law Firm of Steven J. Baum; Has Halloween Party Where They Are Making Fun Of Foreclosure Victims

On Friday, the law firm of Steven J. Baum threw a Halloween party.The firm, which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonly referred to as a “foreclosure mill” firm, meaning it represents banks and mortgage servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from their homes. Steven J. Baum is, in fact, the largest such firm in New York; it represents virtually all the giant mortgage lenders, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

The party is the firm’s big annual bash. Employees wear Halloween costumes to the office, where they party until around noon, and then return to work, still in costume. I can’t tell you how people dressed for this year’s party, but I can tell you about last year’s.

That’s because a former employee of Steven J. Baum recently sent me snapshots of last year’s party. In an e-mail, she said that she wanted me to see them because they showed an appalling lack of compassion toward the homeowners — invariably poor and down on their luck — that the Baum firm had brought foreclosure proceedings against.

When we spoke later, she added that the snapshots are an accurate representation of the firm’s mind-set. “There is this really cavalier attitude,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that people are going to lose their homes.” Nor does the firm try to help people get mortgage modifications; the pressure, always, is to foreclose. I told her I wanted to post the photos on The Times’s Web site so that readers could see them. She agreed, but asked to remain anonymous because she said she fears retaliation.

Let me describe a few of the photos. In one, two Baum employees are dressed like homeless people. One is holding a bottle of liquor. The other has a sign around her neck that reads: “3rd party squatter. I lost my home and I was never served.” My source said that “I was never served” is meant to mock “the typical excuse” of the homeowner trying to evade a foreclosure proceeding.

A second picture shows a coffin with a picture of a woman whose eyes have been cut out. A sign on the coffin reads: “Rest in Peace. Crazy Susie.” The reference is to Susan Chana Lask, a lawyer who had filed a class-action suit against Steven J. Baum — and had posteda YouTube video denouncing the firm’s foreclosure practices. “She was a thorn in their side,” said my source.

.

A third photograph shows a corner of Baum’s office decorated to look like a row of foreclosed homes. Another shows a sign that reads, “Baum Estates” — needless to say, it’s also full of foreclosed houses. Most of the other pictures show either mock homeless camps or mock foreclosure signs — or both. more