Bahraini Women Mourn

Bahraini women wait outside a hospital in Manama, Bahrain, Thursday, Feb. 17, 2011, where victims of the confrontation between anti-government protestors and riot police were being treated. Armed patrols prowled neighborhoods and tanks appeared in the streets for the first time after riot police with tear gas and clubs drove protesters from a main square where they had demanded sweeping political change

Muslims Riot in Stockholm

Stockholm: “It is raining stones For the second night in a row, there were riots in the Rinkeby and Tensta suburbs of Stockholm. About 50 youth set fire to cars, the mentor program at the Rinkeby school, and a police department."

Stockholm: “It is raining stones" (more)

Stoning, how fitting.

This is what is happening in Sweden, the second stage of a lawless and brutal civil war -- brought on by themselves, much as all of Europe has done. What is so terrifying is that America is following their lead in the appeasement of Islamic supremacists.

I am sure that a real attempt to bring the Muslim riots under control will be met by strong condemnation and rebuke by the OIC (Organization of the Islamic Conference)-driven UN.

Riots must be brought under control: Reinfeldt

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt cautioned that the riots that blighted the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby on Monday and Tuesday needed to be brought quickly under control.

* Fires and rioting in Stockholm suburb (9 Jun 10)

"The consequences risk becoming very serious and could affect the people living in Rinkeby," he told the TT news agency.

Education Minister Jan Björklund and Integration Minister Nyamko Sabuni on Wednesday visited Rinkeby to take stock of the situation.

Up to 100 youths have rioted for two straight nights in the Stockholm suburb, throwing bricks, setting fires and attacking the local police station, police said Wednesday.

"They set fire to a school building ... They tried to set fire to the police station and other buildings and vehicles, but mostly they have thrown rocks and bricks at police and fire fighters," police spokesperson Mats Eriksson told AFP.

He said no one had so far been injured in the riots which began on Monday in the northern suburb long blighted by high levels of unemployment and home to a large number of first and second generation immigrants.

"The whole thing started when a group of young adults were not permitted to enter a junior high school dance. They got angry and started throwing rocks through the school windows," Eriksson said.

Up to 100 people went on a rampage, breaking 23 windows at the local police station and setting at least one car ablaze and leaving a school set up as a mentor programme for young people to find their way into the labour market, burned to the ground.

Three people were arrested late Monday, but had since been released, Eriksson said, adding that "I would say things got worse" Tuesday night, when the school and four or five cars were set on fire.

"Fire fighters were there but they couldn't approach the blaze (at the school building, which was basically burned to the ground), because they were under attack," he said.

Eriksson said local police in the western part of Stockholm would receive reinforcements from across the capital to try to calm tensions in Rinkeby.

"This is an extremely serious situation and we must bring it to an end as soon as possible, otherwise it will keep getting worse," he said mirroring Reinfeldt's words, adding the riots were "an attack on both the society as a whole and on the residents in the area."

* Riots must be brought under control: Reinfeldt (9 Jun 10)
* Fires and rioting after Malmö suburb unrest (29 Apr 10)
* Youth gang forces Malmö pre-school closure (26 Apr 10)

Iran System Based on Force Illegitimate

Iran System Based on Force Illegitimate
[[MONTAZERI]]
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: On Saturday in Iran, Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, the most senior cleric living in Iran and one of the two top sources of religious emulation in Shiite Islam, issued a series of fatwas suggesting that the supreme leader could be illegitimate and saying that he could be working with the government against religion. Montazeri has called on people to take action against injustice, even if they have to pay a heavy price for it. Now joining us from Denver is Nader Hashemi. He teaches Middle Eastern and Islamic politics at the University of Denver. Thanks for joining us, Nader.

NADER HASHEMI, PROFESSOR OF MIDDLE EAST AND ISLAMIC POLITICS, UNIV. OF DENVER: Glad to be with you.

JAY: Nader, before you talk about Ayatollah's statement, just give us a little bit of your own background and your connection to Iran.

HASHEMI: I'm the product of Iranian Muslim immigrant parents to Canada. My father in the early 1960s was active in the early pro-democracy movement in Iran, and he was very close with several people who ended up being leaders in the 1979 Islamic revolution. So there's a long history in our family of pro-democracy activism. Our family actually moved back to the Iran after the 1979 revolution, where I was able to witness firsthand the early post-revolutionary era power struggle, political conflict, contestation, and human rights violations.

JAY: And tell people quickly the name of your new book.

HASHEMI: Yeah, and I'm the author of a new book, called Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy, published by Oxford University Press, that came out this year.

JAY: Okay. I'm going to read a section of the Ayatollah's statement and then talk a bit about what you think the significance of it is. "Preserving the political system is not by itself an issue, particularly when the system becomes the same as a person [who rules the system and the people]." (http://tehranbureau.com/grand-ayatollah-montazeris-fatwa/) The Ayatollah went on to say, "A political system based on force, oppression, changing people's votes, killing, closure [of organs of civil society], arresting [people] and using Stalinist and medieval torture, creating repression, censorship of newspapers, interruption of the means of mass communications, jailing the enlightened and the elite of society for false reasons, and forcing them to make false confessions in jail is condemned and illegitimate." So, Nader, that's pretty powerful words. He doesn't in the statement directly accuse the supreme leader of doing it, but it's pretty clear, the context within which he is saying it. So tell us who this ayatollah is and how important is this statement.

HASHEMI: Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri is one of Iran's leading grand ayatollahs. There's only about a dozen of them. He is one of the most senior, and he's also one of the most politically active. He's widely regarded to have been one of the leaders of the 1979 Islamic revolution, and for most of the first decade in Iran, he was the designated successor to Ayatollah Khomeini, in large part because of his activism against the pro-Western monarchy in Iran in 1979, where he was in jail, he was imprisoned, he was tortured. And he also ended up developing and devising some of the most important theological justifications for the current Islamic republican system. So he's both a learned senior cleric who has a lot of moral authority in a religious society, he's one of the founders of the Islamic Revolution, and he was the designated successor of Ayatollah Khomeini until he was forced to step down when he became vocal and outspoken in terms of the growing authoritarianism of Iran's political system and the abuse of human rights. So he's someone who has a lot of moral authority in Iranian society, both by virtue of the fact that he's a grand senior ayatollah, but also because he's a politicized ayatollah. He is someone who frequently comments on political affairs. He has been a thorn in the side of the regime for many years, dating back to the late 1980s when he started to speak out against growing corruption, human rights violations. And he's really stuck to that position. It's been a consistent pattern. And this latest statement or fatwa is really the most, I think, vociferous denunciation of the political status quo in Iran, the crisis of state and society undermining and questioning the very legitimacy of not only the supreme leader but the Islamic Republic of Iran as it manifests itself today in Iranian [society].

JAY: And a lot of the interviews we've been doing, we've been getting a picture of the Iranian elite, which we understand is a quite complicated class, but with two kind of primary camps right now: Rafsanjani, who has been backing Mousavi; and then the other camp: the supreme leader, the Revolutionary Guard, Ahmadinejad. And roughly we've been seeing this picture of two camps, both camps—certainly Rafsanjani and the Revolutionary guard—having deep economic interests, Rafsanjani a multibillionaire, the Revolutionary Guard controlling more and more of the economy. Is Ayatollah Montazeri allied with one of these camps? Or is he considered in sort of a clerical third force?

HASHEMI: Well, he's not allied with any camp, because he doesn't hold political power. The different groups that you mentioned—and, by the way, I would say that there's more than simply two camps, but, you know, we can go into that later. But he is aloof from politics. I mean, he is really someone who stands—after he was deposed in 1988 as the successor to Khomeini, he basically went back to his religious teachings and his seminary in the holy city of Qom and focused his time and attention on his theological studies, but also became sort of a moral critic of the political system. So he's not allied to any of these camps, but he has been a resource for reformists, for pro-democratic forces to draw upon, precisely by virtue of the moral authority and religious authority that he has. So they would appeal to him during moments of crisis such as this one for advice, for commentary.

JAY: So just how influential it is Montazeri? So, for example, he issues this statement. Do people of Tehran know about it? I assume state television isn't going to carry it. But do imams read it? Do people in the countryside ever know that he issued this statement? How does this get out?

HASHEMI: Well, thanks to the wonders of globalization—there's a lot of criticism of globalization, but there is a technological and telecommunications revolution that makes it very difficult for authoritarian regimes to prevent, despite their best efforts, access to information. So this gets circulated through a variety of means. And to those people who are interested, it does filter down and it does inform their political consciousness.

JAY: But the majority of people in Iran don't have access to the Internet. I know there's been a lot of talk about this being a Twitter revolution, but I would assume the majority of people that were in the streets probably don't get on the Internet. So just how far—is there any way this filters out through the religious institutions itself? Or is it really dependent on the Internet and such?

HASHEMI: Most people do not have access to Internet, and this whole discussion of a Twitter revolution, I think, makes for great reporting, but it it doesn't, I think, represent the political reality in Iran today. Religious clerics, people in the seminaries, political activists will know of this statement and they will, particularly those on the Democratic side of the debate, will gain a lot of succor and sustenance from this statement.

JAY: Ayatollah Montazeri's been a critic of this regime, as you mentioned, for quite some time. Is there anything radically different about this statement? Or are people going to his say, well, he's always been a critic, so there's nothing really new here?

HASHEMI: I think this statement is to be distinguished from previous statements, because in many ways, I think, he accurately sort of captures the political status quo in terms of the growing repression of the regime, the growing clampdown on human rights, and the growing illegitimacy that many people feel, particularly those who are religiously minded. I mean, he's speaking here to the—and his influence is among those who are pious, who are religious, and who form a large part of Iran's political constituency. So I think that this statement will resonate. And what distinguishes it from previous statements [is] it is much more bolder. He's actually drawing parallels with Stalinism, with communist and fascist regimes. And that's a heavy indictment for this regime in Iran today.

JAY: Yeah. I'll read one more segment of this. He says: "Iran belongs to the people, not to you and me, and they make the decisions, and the officials are their servants. People must be able to gather peacefully, and defend their rights both in writing and orally. When the Shah heard people’s revolutionary voice, it was too late. It is hoped that the officials will not allow the same situation to develop again, by being as flexible as possible about the people’s demands." Comparing this situation to the overthrow of the Shah is quite radical. He's talking about the system itself could be in jeopardy here. Is he in any danger saying these things? And to what extent does he reflect clerical opinion here?

HASHEMI: Well, he's not in any danger, because he is in his 80s, he's in very frail health. He was under house arrest for five years after he issued a very famous criticism of the supreme leader and the growing authoritarianism of the regime in 1997. So there's not much the regime can do to him physically except try to silence his views and not allow them to be disseminated. And to what extent does his ideas—are they a reflection of clerical opinion? Well, it's difficult to say, but my general reading of what's taking place in Iran today is that there is an increasingly vast number of clerical members, younger, up-and-coming religious scholars, students, who are very sympathetic to Ayatollah Khomeini's critique of the Islamic Republican system, in large part because the last 30 years has been a very educational experience for large numbers of Iranians in terms of the problems and the dangers of a close embrace between religion and politics. And people are realizing that, look, the status quo is no longer untenable [sic], and that in order to preserve religion's integrity in society, its value, its respectability among the population, there has to be some reconsideration of the current political status quo. And so he's basically offering a moral and ethical critique of the relationship between religion and politics, and making very courageous and bold sort of statements and comparisons, essentially saying that Iran is in a situation very similar to the situation just prior to the 1979 revolution. And he's coming very close to saying that the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, is behaving like the former monarch, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

JAY: Thanks for joining us. And on the next segment of this interview, let's talk about who's been on the streets, what makes up that movement, and what is the role of Western policy, and perhaps, as some people have said, Western involvement, in what's going on in Iran. Thanks for joining us on The Real News Network.

DISCLAIMER:

Please note that TRNN transcripts are typed from a recording of the program; The Real News Network cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.

Food Profiteering and Starvation

Profiteers Drive 100 Millions Towards Starvation

By Geoffrey Lean, Independent UK

Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry.

The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared over the past year driving the world's poor -- who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food -- into hunger and destitution.

The World Bank says that 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world's richest food companies are making record profits. Monsanto last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m (£275m) to $1.12 billion. Its profits increased from $1.44 billion to $2.22 billion.

Cargill's net earnings soared by 86 per cent from $553m to $1.030 billion over the same three months. And Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world's largest agricultural processors of soy, corn and wheat, increased its net earnings by 42 per cent in the first three months of this year from $363m to $517m. The operating profit of its grains merchandising and handling operations jumped 16-fold from $21m to $341m.

Similarly, the Mosaic Company, one of the world's largest fertiliser companies, saw its income for the three months ending 29 February rise more than 12-fold, from $42.2m to $520.8m, on the back of a shortage of fertiliser. The prices of some kinds of fertiliser have more than tripled over the past year as demand has outstripped supply. As a result, plans to increase harvests in developing countries have been hit hard.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation reports that 37 developing countries are in urgent need of food. And food riots are breaking out across the globe from Bangladesh to Burkina Faso, from China to Cameroon, and from Uzbekistan to the United Arab Emirates.

Skyrocketing Food Prices

'Haiti, Congo, and the politics of hunger'

by Jennifer Brea

Skyrocketing food prices have already sparked riots in Haiti, Egypt and Mozambique this month as a worsening crisis not only threatens to leave thousands vulnerable to starvation, but will test weak and ineffective governments in poor countries around the world.

Two francophone bloggers, one Haitian, one Congolese, respond, but rather than blame the proximate cause--subsidies for biofuels in rich countries--they criticize the politics and the politicians who left their countries this vulnerable to begin with. They write that the riots of these last few weeks and the riots to come, like the crisis itself, are symptomatic of deeper problems that cannot be solved by the simple magic of foreign aid.

Haitian blogger Natifnatal wrote an angry, heartbreaking post as she watched events in Haiti unfolding from thousands of miles away, in Abu Dhabi, which she suggests is a sort of self-imposed exile. It's called "When politicians serve hunger to score points."

These last few weeks, Haiti has returned to the front pages. As far away as you are, the news pulls you in, the images shake you, your throat chokes with embarrassment, and you burn with anger. You are, in effect, angry at the way in which your country is reduced in the press: to , destroying the few shops operating in a country that has not functioned in a long time. You are angry because it is impossible to respond to the reactions of foreigners who are watching like you and who understand nothing. Should I begin with 1492, talking about discovery, slavery, and the prosperity of the ex-Pearl of the Antilles, of the struggle for independence, of Toussaint Louverture? Or should I tell about the degradation that has punctuated our daily lives since 1804: occupation, dictatorship, massacres, the allure of democracy with Aristide that gave way to demogoguery, and then end with the kidnappings, coups d'etat, poverty, indigence, and the hopelessness that haunts us daily. For
those who don't even know the basics can present the equation: hunger + poverty + rising prices=demonstrations + the Prime Minister's resignation + violence, and argue that an increase in food aid would suffice to reduce hunger.

But those of you who know Haiti, who still breathe her air in spite of the distance between you, who still cry silently when you have a parent on the telephone, you know that the situation is far from that simple. You know that these demonstrations are not innocent, that there is an invisible hand behind these acts of violence, that these so-called demands are not the result of accident, that the dismissal of the Prime Minister or cash payments won't change much, and that the rioters are nothing more than pawns in the skilled hands of the maniacs in power.

Because you know the cold truth, and you are sick of it. You have run away from the political machinations, you have broken your ties with Haiti, you have resigned yourself to you condition of being "stateless," these moments are enough to make your pulse race, your heartbeat go irregular, to make you want to pull out your hair, to curse destiny, and prove to you, for the umpteenth time, that you were right to leave.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Musengeshi Katata at Forum Realisance, watching events in Haiti and Egypt, writes a post called, "Today, Haiti. Tomorrow, the world."

Katata touches on the relationship between the current food crisis, the ecological devastation of the planet, energy demand, biofuels, and how India and China, developing rapidly and without the latest in energy-saving technologies, are coming to Africa in search of natural resources.

He asks "Why is Africa so slow to understand that it's only going to get more difficult [to develop] in the future?" and predicts that "the next few years will be bad, so bad that we will ask ourselves if Hell is African" because "rich countries will, as they always have, place the heavy weight of this intensifying crisis on the shoulders of poor countries" [Fr]

But in the end, Katata puts most of the responsibility on African elites themselves, predicting that "many incapable governments and puppet regimes are going to implode" in the coming years unless they recognize their own self-interest lies with protecting the interests of their people.

...the Tsunami, as one of our Internet brothers wrote, will soon reach Africa with, as the World Bank has predicted, the inevitable revolts and famines. How can we present things to our black and African elites so that they will understand that they are asleep at the helm, that their view of things is disastrous and detrimental to their own well-being and future? Must Africans and their descendants continue to let themselves be run by the West, and to fail to see what threatens to happen, after decades and decades of the vicissitudes of chronic need and poverty? It's enough to ask, do blacks refuse to think and draw useful conclusions or are they just incapable?

All of those countries who live off foreign aid, all those under the aid and false promises of the industrialized countries who have not developed their own domestic agriculture will come to know, in the years that follow, hard years of bitterness. The economic crisis that we have known since what will soon be 30 years will intensify and eat away at the meager means of all the poor countries. And those who hope or believe that foreign aid can help ease the situation are fooling themselves yet again: this help, although a salve, is at the same time actually a poison, and in spite of the misery and the poverty, a stepped-up effort cannot make up for this type of shortfall in the future. Because, let's be honest, aid corrupts and enables deceptive appearances; that's what often stops people, as we know, from seeing [the forest for the trees], from seeing the problem as it is and remedying it as wisely as possible...

You may view the latest post at

http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2008/04/18/haiti-congo-and-the-politics-of-hunger/