Tag Archives: Africa

Feb 7 2013

The Guardian takes note of a Middle Eastern country not involved in “rendition”

A guest post by AKUS

Controversy over the practice of “rendition” has been intense. In a recent article in the Washington Post, the Post described it as a CIA program “to detain and interrogate foreign suspects without bringing them to the United States or charging them with any crimes”

The Washington Post illustrated how widely the practice was implemented with a map in an article headlined: A staggering map of the 54 countries that reportedly participated in the CIA’s rendition program, drawn from a report by the Open Society Justice Initiative  that lists each country by name and describes that country’s participation in the program.

1

In case you cannot make out one little country that did not participate in the program, here’s an extract from that map of a certain area of the world:

1

See it now?

On the other hand, it does not take much effort to see other countries, frequent critics of Israel, with well-organized, well-funded groups constantly threatening it with boycotts, decrying its policies and so forth, and even supporting its enemies with weapons and money.

There was a February 5th, 2013 column in the Guardian about this, too: CIA rendition: more than a quarter of countries ‘offered covert support’ . To my surprise, the Guardian managed to take note of Israel’s absence from the list of 54 countries:

Other countries are conspicuous by their absence from the rendition list: Sweden and Finland are present, but there is no evidence of Norwegian involvement. Similarly, while many Middle Eastern countries did become involved in the rendition programme, Israel did not, according to the OSJI research.

I, on the other hand, took note of South Africa’s name on the list. After all, one of the calumnies thrown at Israel, and found on a daily basis in the Guardian CiF section in the threads to the endless articles decrying Israel for this or that,  is that it resembles an apartheid state.  South Africa’s government, influenced in some measure by its Muslim Indian constituency, is one of the few outside the Middle East that has made it government policy to support boycotts of Israeli product, academics, and cultural groups.  South Africa is often held up as an example of what the imaginary “one state” would look like after the Jewish state vanishes and “Palestine” exists “between the sea and the river”.

But never fear that Guardianistas could possibly leave Israel out of the issue.  After one post that noted that Israel did not participate in the program, there was this comment:

 1.jpg

The thread quickly filled up with comment after comment claiming that even though the report did not name Israel, and the Guardian specifically took note of that, Israel was just as bad or even worse.

Even when a report does not mention Israel, the appetite for condemnation of Israel among Guardian readers is so developed that rather than discussing, for example, South Africa’s involvement, even the absence of Israel quickly becomes the topic de jour. Or, as the following poster noted in response to a comment no longer visible:

one

—

The Washington Post:

The 54 governments identified in this report span the continents of Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America, and include: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.

 

Related articles
Jul 21 2011

Africa starves while international community continues to lavish aid on Gaza

A guest post by AKUS

Starvation of biblical proportions is sweeping across Africa. The pictures, like this one, are horrifying:

( Washington Post: U.N.: Famine in Somalia is killing tens of thousands)

But Gaza gets the food, the flotillas, and the boundless sympathy of the champagne humanitarians.

It is more than time to shut down UNRWA and send the food to those who really need it – not that crowd of world-class spongers:

Elder also recently posted this graph, indicating the top recipients of humanitarian aid between 2000-2009:

Elder noted:

In absolute terms, Sudan receives the most aid and “Palestine” the second most (the gap is narrowing in recent years.)  But on a per-capita basis, the Palestinian Arabs receive about 9 times as much aid as the Sudanese do, and of course far more aid per capita than any other people on the planet.

Related articles
Dec 27 2010

The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall feels Omar al-Bashir’s pain

Omar al-Bashir

Simon Tisdall, assistant editor of the Guardian, in his apologia for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir (“Omar al-Bashir is no bogeyman”, The Guardian, Dec. 27 ), reached new depths of moral equivalence; showed himself, and the paper he represents, to be deeply, and irretrievably, embedded in the ideological abyss of post-Colonialism, Western guilt, and anti-Americanism.

 

The following passage by Tisdall should be used in textbooks as an example of how even the most ludicrous charges of racism against the United States hold weight among the hard left intelligentsia.

Bashing Omar al-Bashir is a popular pastime in progressive circles, not least in the conscience-flaunting milieus favoured by actor George Clooney and other celebrity campaigners. Sudan’s president, demonised by the UN over Darfur, pre-judged by the international criminal court’s chief prosecutor and ostracised by western governments, makes an easy target. America always needs bogeymen and Bashir fits the bill: big, bothersome, bad-tempered, black, Arab and Muslim.

Later, summing up al-Bashir’s actions, Tisdall drops this jaw dropping line:

Bashir, so far, is behaving reasonably well.

Al-Bashir, the first sitting head of state ever charged with genocide, was accused of being criminally responsible for:

“intentionally directing attacks [by the government backed Arab Janjaweed milita] against an important part of the [tribal black] civilian population of Darfur, Sudan, murdering, exterminating, raping, torturing and forcibly transferring large numbers of civilians and pillaging their property”.

The violence in Darfur, the charges state, was the result of a common plan organized at the highest level of the Sudanese government.

Up to 400,000 people were killed as the result of Bashir’s actions, and millions have become refugees.

It takes a lot of ideological conditioning to truly believe that the U.S. government wakes up in the morning looking for a black man, or Muslim, to demonize, and that American policy in Sudan is indeed driven by such racism.

John Prendergast, director of African Affairs at the National Security Council for the Clinton White House, said:

“…these tribal blacks have been subjected to one of the most brutal campaigns of ethnic cleansing that Africa has ever seen.

The Janjaweed are like a grotesque mixture of the mafia and the Ku Klux Klan…These guys have a racist ideology that sees the Arab population as the supreme population that would like to see the subjugation of non-Arab peoples.”

Though this blog is concerned with anti-Semitism (and the assault on Israel’s legitimacy) at the Guardian, and their blog, Comment is Free, Simon Tisdall’s apologia for the man responsible for the most hideous crime in Africa’s history – under the banner of anti-racism! – should serve to put in perspective his paper’s continuing vitriol against the Jewish state.

The newspaper which aims to become the world’s leading liberal voice shows itself, time and again, to be viscerally hostile to a democracy under siege in a region dominated by despots, yet has a soft spot for genocidal tyrants.

Something is profoundly wrong if the Guardian’s fellow political travelers can’t find the courage to call such moral blindness for what it is – a tragic and dangerous distortion of everything it ever meant to be called a progressive.

This is 85-year-old Abu Hamid Omar. Not only was he burned and branded in an attack by the Janjaweed and Sudanese Government forces, but his village was burned to the ground. Abu Hamid Omar was the ONLY villager to survive the assault.