CounterPunch Diary
Weekend Edition
July 30 - August 1, 2010
Do Disclosures of Atrocities Change Anything?
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
The hope of the brave soldier who sent 92,000 secret U.S. documents to Wikileaks was that their disclosure would prompt public revulsion and increasing political pressure on Obama to seek with all speed a diplomatic conclusion to this war. The documents he sent Wikileaks included overwhelming documentary evidence – accepted by all as genuine, of:
* the methodical use of a death squad made up of US Special Forces, known as Task Force 373,
* willful, casual slaughter of civilians by Coalition personnel, with ensuing cover-ups,
*the utter failure of “counter-insurgency” and “nation building”,
*the venality and corruption of the Coalition’s Afghan allies,
*the complicity of Pakistan’s Intelligence Services with the Taliban,
Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, skillfully arranged simultaneous publication of the secret material in the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel.
The story broke on the eve of a war-funding vote in the U.S. Congress. Thirty-six hours after the stories hit the news stands, the U.S. House of Representatives last Tuesday evening voted Aye to a bill already passed by the Senate that funds a $33 billion, 30,000-troop escalation in Afghanistan. The vote was 308 to 114. To be
sure, more US Reps voted against escalation than a year ago when the Noes totted up to only 35. That’s a crumb of comfort, but the cruel truth is that in 24 hours the White House, Pentagon ,with the help of licensed members of the Commentariat and influential papers like the Washington Post, had finessed the salvoes from Wikileaks.
“WikiLeaks disclosures unlikely to change course of Afghanistan war” was the Washington Post’s Tuesday morning headline. Beneath this headline the news story said the leaks had been discussed for only 90 seconds at a meeting of senior commanders in the Pentagon. The story cited “senior officials” in the White House even brazenly claiming that that it was precisely his reading of these same raw secret intelligence reports a year ago that prompted Obama “to pour more troops and money into a war effort that had not received sufficient attention or resources from the Bush administration.” (As in: “Get that death squad operating more efficiently” – an orderenacted by Obama’s appointment of General McChrystal as his Afghan commander, elevated from his previous job as top U.S. Death Squad general in charge of the Pentagon’s world-wide operations in this area.)
There’s some truth in the claim that long before Wikileaks released the 92,000 files the overall rottenness and futility of the Afghan war had been graphically reported in the press. Earlier this year, for example, reporting by Jerome Starkey of The Times of London blew apart the U.S. military’s cover-up story after Special Forces troops killed two pregnant Afghan women and a girl in a February, 2010, raid, in which two Afghan government officials were also killed.
It’s oversell to describe the Wikileaks package as a latterday Pentagon Papers. But it’s undersell to dismiss them as “old stories” as disingenuous detractors have been doing. The Wikileaks files are a damning series of snapshots of a disastrous and criminal enterprise. In the Wikileaks files there is a compelling series of secret documents about the death squad operated by the US military known as Task Force 373. an undisclosed "black" unit of special forces, which has been hunting down targets for death or detention without trial. From Wikileaks for the first time we learn that more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a "kill or capture" list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritized effects list.
There are logs showing that Task Force 373 simply killed their targets without attempting to capture. The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.
One could watch Assange being interviewed on US news programs where he would raise the fact that the US military has been – is still – running a death squad along the model of the Phoenix Program, His interviewers simply changed the subject. Liberal gate-keepers complained that the Wikileaks documents were raw files, unmediated by responsible imperial journalists such as themselves. This echoed the usual ritual whines from the Pentagon about the untimely disclosures of “sources and methods”.
The bitter truth is that wars are not often ended by disclosures of their horrors and futility in the press, with consequent public uproar.
Disclosures from the mid-1950s that the French were torturing Algerians amid the war of independence were numerous. Henri Alleg’s famous 1958 account of his torture, La Question, sold 60,000 copies in a single day. Torture duly became more pervasive, and the war more savage, under the supervision of a nominally Socialist French government.
After Ron Ridenhour and then Seymour Hersh broke the My Lai massacre in 1968 in Vietnam with over 500 men, women and babies methodically, beaten, sexually abused, tortured and then murdered by American GIs, -- a tactless disclosure of “methods” -- there was public revulsion, then an escalation in slaughter. The war ran for another seven years.
It is true, as Noam Chomsky pointed out to me last week, when I asked him for positive examples, that popular protest in the wake of press disclosures “impelled Congress to call off the direct US role in the grotesque bombing of rural Cambodia. Similarly in the late 70s, under popular pressure Congress barred Carter, later Reagan, from direct participation in virtual genocide in the Guatemalan highlands, so the Pentagon had to evade legislation in devious ways and Reagan had to call in terrorist states, primarily Israel, to carry out the massacres.”
Even though New York Times editors edited out the word “indiscriminate” from Thomas Friedman’s news report of Israel’s bombing of Beirut in 1982, tv news footage from Lebanon prompted President Reagan to order Israeli prime minister Begin to stop, and he did. (On one account, which I tend to believe, the late Michael Deaver, was watching live footage of the bombing in his White House office and went into Reagan, saying "This is disgusting and you should stop it.")
This happened again when Peres's forces bombed the UN compound in Qana in 2006, causing much international outrage, and Clinton ordered it ended. There was a repeat once more in 2006, with another bombing of Qana that aroused a lot of international protest. But as Chomsky concludes in his note to me, “I think one will find very few such examples, and almost none in the case of really major war crimes.”
So one can conclude pessimistically that exposure of war crimes, torture and so forth, often leads to intensification of the atrocities, with government and influential newspapers and commentators supervising a kind of hardening process. "Yes, this -- murder, torture, wholesale slaughter of civilians - is indeed what it takes." Even though this pattern is long-standing, it often comes as a great surprise. A friend of mine was at a dinner with the CBS news producers, shortly before they broke the Abu Ghraib tortures. Almost everyone at the table thought that Bush might well be impeached.
The important constituency here is liberals, who duly rise to the challenge of unpleasant disclosures of imperial crimes. In the wake of scandals such as those revealed at Abu Ghraib, or in the Wikileaks files, they are particularly eager to proclaim that they “can take it” – i.e., endure convincing accounts of monstrous tortures, targeted assassinations by US forces, obliteration of wedding parties or entire villages, and emerge with ringing affirmations of the fundamental overall morality of the imperial enterprise. This was very common in the Vietnam war and repeated in subsequent imperial ventures such the sanctions and ensuing attack on Iraq, and now the war in Afghanistan. Of course in the case of Israel it’s an entire way of life for a handsome slice of America’s liberals.
What does end wars? One side is annihilated, the money runs out, the troops mutiny, the government falls, or fears it will. With the U.S. war in Afghanistan none of these conditions has yet been met. The U.S. began the destruction of Afghanistan in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Advisor Zbigniev Brzezinksi started financing the mullahs and warlords in the largest and most expensive operation in the CIA’s history until that time. Here we are, more than three decades later, half buried under a mountain of horrifying news stories about a destroyed land of desolate savagery and what did one hear on many news commentaries earlier this week? Indignant bleats often by liberals, about Wikileaks’ “irresponsibility” in releasing the documents; twitchy questions such as that asked by The Nation’s Chris Hayes on the Rachel Maddow Show: “I wonder ultimately to whom WikiLeaks ends up being accountable.”
The answer to that last question was given definitively in 1851 by Robert Lowe, editorial writer for the London Times. He had been instructed by his editor to refute the claim of a government minister that if the press hoped to share the influence of statesmen, it “must also share in the responsibilities of statesmen.”
“The first duty of the press,” Lowe wrote, “is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation… The Press lives by disclosures… For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences – to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice and oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/
Saturday 31 July 2010
War on terror's other cost: undeserved anger at all Muslims
War on terror's other cost: undeserved anger at all Muslims
A US soldier explains how he keeps anger over Islamist terrorists from becoming prejudice against Muslims in general.
By Thomas W. Young / July 30, 2010
This September and October, Americans mark the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the ninth year of war in Afghanistan, respectively. This war has become arguably the longest in our history. Given the jihad-until-doomsday rhetoric of the Islamists, the war on terror will probably stay with us in one form or another for the foreseeable future.
As the costs mount in blood and treasure, little wonder that the war corrodes the way we think about Muslims and Muslim countries. After all, the worst attack on American soil was hatched in Afghanistan, allegedly planned by a Pakistani, and carried out mainly by Saudis.
It is admittedly tempting to let conflict define our relationship with Muslims. Controversial bus ads about Islam in several US cities are forcing an uncomfortable conversation about this relationship. For those of us who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, it becomes personal. Nobody likes getting shot at.
Firsthand experience in a Muslim country
But several years ago, I had a different kind of experience in a Muslim country – one I like to recall in contrast to the events that dominate the news today.
On the first flight of my deployment, our Air Force C-130 cargo plane lifted off from Dhaka, Bangladesh. Water the color of mocha rippled beneath us, inundating slums and hovels, streets and fields. Bangladesh was suffering a flood of historic proportions.
Unlike most floods in the US, where a river overflows its banks and runs swollen along its course, the Bangladeshi flood had no identifiable river channel. Just a flat, drenched expanse – miles of it. As we climbed, the water stretched to the horizon. It was like an inland sea, dotted with treetops and shanty roofs. Tarp shelters clustered on the few patches of ground high enough to remain dry.
We carried about a dozen Bangladeshi air force cadets; it was the first time most of them had ever flown. Several minutes after takeoff, an oil pump failed. In less than 90 seconds, all the oil from one of our four engines spewed and misted into the floodwater. We shut down the engine, declared an emergency, turned around, and landed back at Dhaka. Muddy water lapped at the airfield’s perimeter.
I apologized to the cadets for their short and perhaps nerve-wracking ride.
They did not seem fazed.
“Not a problem, sir!” one of them barked, locked at attention. We could not get those guys to relax, but even through extreme military protocol, they exuded goodwill. “Thank you for the experience, sir,” another offered.
Due to the flood, our mission to demonstrate the capabilities of the C-130 Hercules quickly turned into a real-world relief operation. Working with Bangladeshi civilians and military personnel, we delivered food and medical supplies to places where floodwater had cut off highways. The Bangladeshis ended up buying four refurbished C-130s for just that purpose.
Not a single moment of hostility
We encountered not one single moment of hostility, not from anyone anywhere in that devoutly Muslim country. It was 1998.
I still have fond memories of the Bangladeshis, their delightfully subtle sense of humor, and their grit and creativity in the face of adversity.
Heartbreakingly poor, they knew how to get the most from whatever they had.
“Sir, we must save the fuel in this generator if you really do not need electricity now,” one soldier told me. Second to Islam, the guiding creed of Bangladeshis seemed to be common sense.
Granted, this was all before 9/11, but it shows that Americans and South Asian Muslims are not necessarily natural enemies. Bangladesh does have its radical Islamists, but the country has never become a major schoolhouse, refuge, and transit point for them like its historical cousin, Pakistan. Islam alone is not the problem.
Sloppy thinking
In the post-9/11 world, it’s way too easy to get sloppy in our thinking and extend our anger over terrorism to Muslims in general.
I understand the root of this anger: My wife works in the Pentagon. In 2001, I worked as an airline pilot – friends of friends were on the hijacked planes that slammed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. On my first missions in Afghanistan, I carried in my flight suit pocket an outdated navigational chart that depicted the Twin Towers.
Yes, I still harbor anger about 9/11. I get angry about continued efforts to attack the US, such as the attempted Times Square bombing earlier this year.
I get angry when I hear of soldiers maimed by improvised explosive devices. I get really angry when my aircraft’s cargo compartment contains flag-draped boxes.
But when I feel that anger metastasize into prejudice, I try to remember that Bangladesh mission, when the allies were Muslim, and the only enemies were hunger and waterborne disease.
Thomas W. Young is a flight engineer with the West Virginia Air National Guard, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the author of the “The Mullah’s Storm,” a forthcoming novel set in the Afghanistan war.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2010/0730/War-on-terror-s-other-cost-undeserved-anger-at-all-Muslims
A US soldier explains how he keeps anger over Islamist terrorists from becoming prejudice against Muslims in general.
By Thomas W. Young / July 30, 2010
This September and October, Americans mark the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the ninth year of war in Afghanistan, respectively. This war has become arguably the longest in our history. Given the jihad-until-doomsday rhetoric of the Islamists, the war on terror will probably stay with us in one form or another for the foreseeable future.
As the costs mount in blood and treasure, little wonder that the war corrodes the way we think about Muslims and Muslim countries. After all, the worst attack on American soil was hatched in Afghanistan, allegedly planned by a Pakistani, and carried out mainly by Saudis.
It is admittedly tempting to let conflict define our relationship with Muslims. Controversial bus ads about Islam in several US cities are forcing an uncomfortable conversation about this relationship. For those of us who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, it becomes personal. Nobody likes getting shot at.
Firsthand experience in a Muslim country
But several years ago, I had a different kind of experience in a Muslim country – one I like to recall in contrast to the events that dominate the news today.
On the first flight of my deployment, our Air Force C-130 cargo plane lifted off from Dhaka, Bangladesh. Water the color of mocha rippled beneath us, inundating slums and hovels, streets and fields. Bangladesh was suffering a flood of historic proportions.
Unlike most floods in the US, where a river overflows its banks and runs swollen along its course, the Bangladeshi flood had no identifiable river channel. Just a flat, drenched expanse – miles of it. As we climbed, the water stretched to the horizon. It was like an inland sea, dotted with treetops and shanty roofs. Tarp shelters clustered on the few patches of ground high enough to remain dry.
We carried about a dozen Bangladeshi air force cadets; it was the first time most of them had ever flown. Several minutes after takeoff, an oil pump failed. In less than 90 seconds, all the oil from one of our four engines spewed and misted into the floodwater. We shut down the engine, declared an emergency, turned around, and landed back at Dhaka. Muddy water lapped at the airfield’s perimeter.
I apologized to the cadets for their short and perhaps nerve-wracking ride.
They did not seem fazed.
“Not a problem, sir!” one of them barked, locked at attention. We could not get those guys to relax, but even through extreme military protocol, they exuded goodwill. “Thank you for the experience, sir,” another offered.
Due to the flood, our mission to demonstrate the capabilities of the C-130 Hercules quickly turned into a real-world relief operation. Working with Bangladeshi civilians and military personnel, we delivered food and medical supplies to places where floodwater had cut off highways. The Bangladeshis ended up buying four refurbished C-130s for just that purpose.
Not a single moment of hostility
We encountered not one single moment of hostility, not from anyone anywhere in that devoutly Muslim country. It was 1998.
I still have fond memories of the Bangladeshis, their delightfully subtle sense of humor, and their grit and creativity in the face of adversity.
Heartbreakingly poor, they knew how to get the most from whatever they had.
“Sir, we must save the fuel in this generator if you really do not need electricity now,” one soldier told me. Second to Islam, the guiding creed of Bangladeshis seemed to be common sense.
Granted, this was all before 9/11, but it shows that Americans and South Asian Muslims are not necessarily natural enemies. Bangladesh does have its radical Islamists, but the country has never become a major schoolhouse, refuge, and transit point for them like its historical cousin, Pakistan. Islam alone is not the problem.
Sloppy thinking
In the post-9/11 world, it’s way too easy to get sloppy in our thinking and extend our anger over terrorism to Muslims in general.
I understand the root of this anger: My wife works in the Pentagon. In 2001, I worked as an airline pilot – friends of friends were on the hijacked planes that slammed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. On my first missions in Afghanistan, I carried in my flight suit pocket an outdated navigational chart that depicted the Twin Towers.
Yes, I still harbor anger about 9/11. I get angry about continued efforts to attack the US, such as the attempted Times Square bombing earlier this year.
I get angry when I hear of soldiers maimed by improvised explosive devices. I get really angry when my aircraft’s cargo compartment contains flag-draped boxes.
But when I feel that anger metastasize into prejudice, I try to remember that Bangladesh mission, when the allies were Muslim, and the only enemies were hunger and waterborne disease.
Thomas W. Young is a flight engineer with the West Virginia Air National Guard, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the author of the “The Mullah’s Storm,” a forthcoming novel set in the Afghanistan war.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2010/0730/War-on-terror-s-other-cost-undeserved-anger-at-all-Muslims
Debate Heating Up on Plans for Mosque Near Ground Zero
Debate Heating Up on Plans for Mosque Near Ground Zero
By MICHAEL BARBARO
Published: July 30, 2010
An influential Jewish organization on Friday announced its opposition to a proposed Islamic center and mosque two blocks north of ground zero in Lower Manhattan, intensifying a fierce national debate about the limits of religious freedom and the meaning of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The decision by the group, the Anti-Defamation League, touched off angry reactions from a range of religious groups, which argued that the country would show its tolerance and values by welcoming the center near the site where radical Muslims killed about2,750 people.
But the unexpected move by the ADL, a mainstream group that has denounced what it saw as bigoted attacks on plans for the Muslim center, could well be a turning point in the battle over the project.
In New York, where ground zero has slowly blended back into the fabric of the city, government officials appear poised to approve plans for the sprawling complex, which would have as many as 15 stories and would house a prayer space, a performing arts center, a pool and a restaurant.
But around the country opposition is mounting, fueled in part by Republican leaders and conservative pundits. Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, has urged “peace-seeking Muslims” to reject the center, branding it an “unnecessary provocation.” A Republican political action committee has produced a television commercial assailing the proposal. And former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has decried it in speeches.
The complex’s rapid evolution from a local zoning dispute into a national referendum highlights the intense and unsettled emotions that still surround the World Trade Center site nine years after the attacks.
To many New Yorkers, especially in Manhattan, it is a construction zone, passed during the daily commute or glimpsed through office windows. To some outside of the city, though, it stands as a hallowed battlefield that must be shielded and memorialized.
Those who are fighting the project argue that building a house of Muslim worship so close to ground zero is at best an affront to the families of those who died there and at worst an act of aggression that would, they say, mark the place where radical Islam achieved a blow against the United States.
“The World Trade Center is the largest loss of American life on our soil since the Civil War,” Mr. Gingrich said. “And we have not rebuilt it, which drives people crazy. And in that setting, we are told, why don’t we have a 13-story mosque and community center?”
He added: “The average American just thinks this is a political statement. It’s not about religion, and is clearly an aggressive act that is offensive.”
Several family members of victims at the World Trade Center have weighed in against the plan, saying it would desecrate what amounts to a graveyard. “When I look over there and see a mosque, it’s going to hurt,” C. Lee Hanson, whose son, Peter, was killed in the attacks, said at a recent public hearing. “Build it someplace else.”
Those who support it seem mystified and flustered by the heated opposition. They contend that the project, with an estimated cost of $100 million, is intended to span the divide between Muslim and non-Muslim, not widen it.
Oz Sultan, the programming director for the center, said the complex was based on Jewish community centers and Y.M.C.A.’s in Manhattan. It is to have a board composed of Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders and is intended to create a national model of moderate Islam.
“We are looking to build bridges between faiths,” Mr. Sultan said in an interview.
City officials, particularly Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, have forcefully defended the project on the grounds of religious freedom, saying that government has no place dictating where a house of worship is located. The local community board has given overwhelming backing to the project, and the city’s landmarks commission is expected to do the same on Tuesday.
“What is great about America, and particularly New York, is we welcome everybody, and if we are so afraid of something like this, what does that say about us?” Mr. Bloomberg asked recently.
“Democracy is stronger than this,” he added. “And for us to just say no is just, I think — not appropriate is a nice way to phrase it.”
Still, the arguments against the Muslim center appear to be resonating. Polling shows that a majority of Americans oppose building it near ground zero.
Resistance is particularly strong among some national Republican leaders. In stump speeches, Twitter messages and op-ed articles, they have turned angry denunciations of the plan into a political rallying cry that they say has surprising potency.
The two major Republican candidates for governor of New York, Rick A. Lazio and Carl Paladino, are making it a central issue in their campaigns, attacking the state’s attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, who is also the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, for not aggressively investigating the project’s finances..
In North Carolina, Ilario Pantano, a former Marine and a Republican candidate for Congress, has also campaigned on the issue, and says it is stirring voters in his rural district, some 600 miles away from ground zero.
A few days ago, at a roadside pizza shop in the small town of Salemburg, he attacked the proposal before an enthusiastic crowd of hog farmers and military veterans.
“Uniformly, there was disgust and disdain in the room for the idea,” Mr. Pantano said.
The issue was wrenching for the Anti-Defamation League, which in the past has spoken out against anti-Islamic sentiment. But its national director, Abraham H. Foxman, said in an interview on Friday that the organization came to the conclusion that the location was offensive to families of victims of Sept. 11, and he suggested that the center’s backers should look for a site “a mile away.”
“It’s the wrong place,” Mr. Foxman said. “Find another place.”
Asked why the opposition of the families was so pivotal in the decision, Mr. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor, said they were entitled to their emotions.
“Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” he said.
Referring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”
The Anti-Defamation League’s statement drew criticism almost immediately.
“The ADL should be ashamed of itself,” said Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, which promotes interethnic and interfaith dialogue. Speaking of the imam behind the proposed center, Feisal Abdul Rauf, he said, “Here, we ask the moderate leaders of the Muslim community to step forward, and when one of them does, he is treated with suspicion.”
C. Welton Gaddy, the president of the Interfaith Alliance, a Washington group that emphasizes religious freedom, called the decision “disappointing,” and said he read about it “with a great deal of sorrow.”
On Friday, Mr. Sultan, the programming director for the proposed Muslim center, expressed surprise and sadness at the news. Told of Mr. Foxman’s remarks about the families of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “That response is just not well thought out.” He said that Muslims had also died on Sept. 11, either because they worked in the twin towers, or responded to the scene.
“The ADL has always been antibigotry,” he said. “This just does not seem consistent with their message.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/31/nyregion/31mosque.html?src=mv&ref=nyregion
By MICHAEL BARBARO
Published: July 30, 2010
An influential Jewish organization on Friday announced its opposition to a proposed Islamic center and mosque two blocks north of ground zero in Lower Manhattan, intensifying a fierce national debate about the limits of religious freedom and the meaning of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The decision by the group, the Anti-Defamation League, touched off angry reactions from a range of religious groups, which argued that the country would show its tolerance and values by welcoming the center near the site where radical Muslims killed about2,750 people.
But the unexpected move by the ADL, a mainstream group that has denounced what it saw as bigoted attacks on plans for the Muslim center, could well be a turning point in the battle over the project.
In New York, where ground zero has slowly blended back into the fabric of the city, government officials appear poised to approve plans for the sprawling complex, which would have as many as 15 stories and would house a prayer space, a performing arts center, a pool and a restaurant.
But around the country opposition is mounting, fueled in part by Republican leaders and conservative pundits. Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, has urged “peace-seeking Muslims” to reject the center, branding it an “unnecessary provocation.” A Republican political action committee has produced a television commercial assailing the proposal. And former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has decried it in speeches.
The complex’s rapid evolution from a local zoning dispute into a national referendum highlights the intense and unsettled emotions that still surround the World Trade Center site nine years after the attacks.
To many New Yorkers, especially in Manhattan, it is a construction zone, passed during the daily commute or glimpsed through office windows. To some outside of the city, though, it stands as a hallowed battlefield that must be shielded and memorialized.
Those who are fighting the project argue that building a house of Muslim worship so close to ground zero is at best an affront to the families of those who died there and at worst an act of aggression that would, they say, mark the place where radical Islam achieved a blow against the United States.
“The World Trade Center is the largest loss of American life on our soil since the Civil War,” Mr. Gingrich said. “And we have not rebuilt it, which drives people crazy. And in that setting, we are told, why don’t we have a 13-story mosque and community center?”
He added: “The average American just thinks this is a political statement. It’s not about religion, and is clearly an aggressive act that is offensive.”
Several family members of victims at the World Trade Center have weighed in against the plan, saying it would desecrate what amounts to a graveyard. “When I look over there and see a mosque, it’s going to hurt,” C. Lee Hanson, whose son, Peter, was killed in the attacks, said at a recent public hearing. “Build it someplace else.”
Those who support it seem mystified and flustered by the heated opposition. They contend that the project, with an estimated cost of $100 million, is intended to span the divide between Muslim and non-Muslim, not widen it.
Oz Sultan, the programming director for the center, said the complex was based on Jewish community centers and Y.M.C.A.’s in Manhattan. It is to have a board composed of Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders and is intended to create a national model of moderate Islam.
“We are looking to build bridges between faiths,” Mr. Sultan said in an interview.
City officials, particularly Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, have forcefully defended the project on the grounds of religious freedom, saying that government has no place dictating where a house of worship is located. The local community board has given overwhelming backing to the project, and the city’s landmarks commission is expected to do the same on Tuesday.
“What is great about America, and particularly New York, is we welcome everybody, and if we are so afraid of something like this, what does that say about us?” Mr. Bloomberg asked recently.
“Democracy is stronger than this,” he added. “And for us to just say no is just, I think — not appropriate is a nice way to phrase it.”
Still, the arguments against the Muslim center appear to be resonating. Polling shows that a majority of Americans oppose building it near ground zero.
Resistance is particularly strong among some national Republican leaders. In stump speeches, Twitter messages and op-ed articles, they have turned angry denunciations of the plan into a political rallying cry that they say has surprising potency.
The two major Republican candidates for governor of New York, Rick A. Lazio and Carl Paladino, are making it a central issue in their campaigns, attacking the state’s attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, who is also the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, for not aggressively investigating the project’s finances..
In North Carolina, Ilario Pantano, a former Marine and a Republican candidate for Congress, has also campaigned on the issue, and says it is stirring voters in his rural district, some 600 miles away from ground zero.
A few days ago, at a roadside pizza shop in the small town of Salemburg, he attacked the proposal before an enthusiastic crowd of hog farmers and military veterans.
“Uniformly, there was disgust and disdain in the room for the idea,” Mr. Pantano said.
The issue was wrenching for the Anti-Defamation League, which in the past has spoken out against anti-Islamic sentiment. But its national director, Abraham H. Foxman, said in an interview on Friday that the organization came to the conclusion that the location was offensive to families of victims of Sept. 11, and he suggested that the center’s backers should look for a site “a mile away.”
“It’s the wrong place,” Mr. Foxman said. “Find another place.”
Asked why the opposition of the families was so pivotal in the decision, Mr. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor, said they were entitled to their emotions.
“Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” he said.
Referring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”
The Anti-Defamation League’s statement drew criticism almost immediately.
“The ADL should be ashamed of itself,” said Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, which promotes interethnic and interfaith dialogue. Speaking of the imam behind the proposed center, Feisal Abdul Rauf, he said, “Here, we ask the moderate leaders of the Muslim community to step forward, and when one of them does, he is treated with suspicion.”
C. Welton Gaddy, the president of the Interfaith Alliance, a Washington group that emphasizes religious freedom, called the decision “disappointing,” and said he read about it “with a great deal of sorrow.”
On Friday, Mr. Sultan, the programming director for the proposed Muslim center, expressed surprise and sadness at the news. Told of Mr. Foxman’s remarks about the families of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “That response is just not well thought out.” He said that Muslims had also died on Sept. 11, either because they worked in the twin towers, or responded to the scene.
“The ADL has always been antibigotry,” he said. “This just does not seem consistent with their message.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/31/nyregion/31mosque.html?src=mv&ref=nyregion
Tuesday 6 July 2010
CORRECTION OF THE BACCALAUREATE ENGLISH EXAM JULY 2010
CORRECTION OF THE BACCALAUREATE ENGLISH EXAM JULY 2010 SC SM SC PC SC ECO LSCH SCH
CORRECTION SC SM SC PC SC ECO
CORRECTION LSCH SCH
CORRECTION SC SM SC PC SC ECO
CORRECTION LSCH SCH
Monday 5 July 2010
BACCALAUREATE ENGLISH EXAM SC SM PC SC ECO
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BACCALAUREATE ENGLISH EXAM JULY 2010 LSCH SCH/LM
BACCALAUREATE ENGLISH EXAM JULY 2010 LSCH SCH/LM
LSCH SCH
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LSCH LM
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LSCH SCH
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LSCH LM
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Thursday 1 July 2010
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