I hope no one finds these articles in poor taste or incorrect. I supplied several sources to cross-reference, especially since the third and controversial excerpt is by Jared Israel.
Pretty amazing that nobody knows this story and most people THINK the US is either fighting Islamist extremism or some even think that we're fighting Islam itself. That's what being portrayed. After all, we got troops. We're killing Talibans or "towel-heads", aren't we? Our stated purpose is to oppose the culture that supposedly led to 9-11.
So what's this?
The International Development Law Org, led by the US with the largest representation by Iranian legal scholars, not only backed a repressive Islamic Sharia Law constitution for Afghanistan, but the US also categorially excluded secular and moderate Afghanis from their brief modern era.
The "War on Terror" LOL. We are killing factions of conservative Muslim believers --- the more secular groups that believe in liberal values, democracy, and education. See several stories below. My comments in blue.
Kabulpress comments on the Afghan government's “Rape Law”
The law as a tool of oppression against Afghan Hazara Shia (this article does not say that the US-backed IDLO is behind this transfomation, see below)
http://kabulpress.org/my/spip.php?article3232
95% of the Afghan Shia minority are ethnic Hazaras, and Hazaras have no desire for Islamic Sharia Law. These Sharia Laws were written by the Afghan Pashtun Sunni majority to restrict and discriminate against the Hazara Shia.
The most extreme Sunni Mullah theocrats view the Shia not as Muslims, but as infidels who should be killed, have their property confiscated, and women enslaved. (The Nat Geographic article below describes a further cultural divide between Hazara Shia and other Afghani Shia.)
Mullah M. Asef Mohseni, an elderly white-bearded ayatollah, who blames the spread of AIDS on soap operas and music videos on Afghan TV, has been the primary proponent of the Personal Status Law. (passed by "our" govt) He is ironically a Shia, but is from Pashtun Kandahar, the cradle of the Taliban, and represents the 5% of the Iranian- related Shia who are much closer to their theocratic Sunni Pashtun brethren than the democracy-oriented Hazara. To say this is a Shia-motivated law is a fraud.
Mohseni’s past has aligned closely with the Taliban and been supported by Iran’s theocracy. He is an example of how far the Afghan government (that we installed, with that Unocal consultant as President) leans toward Taliban rule.
Mohseni was the leader of the military mujahidin group Harkat-e-Islami during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He allied with Gulbaden Hekmatyar (Osama Bin Laden's closest ally) and the warlords who wrote the 1993 Afghan constitution which led to the near destruction of Afghanistan and rise of the Taliban. (this is the govt we approve and we now defend)
(The CIA denies that we shipped arms and billions of dollars to Osama Bin Laden, but that's on a technicality. The CIA apparently worked more directly with Gulbideen Hekmatyar. That's according to an article by FAIR and Norman Solomon too. Is it any wonder we can't seem to find Hekmatyar's buddy Osama Bin Laden?)
Mohseni and his puritanical militia were accused of war crimes during and after the Afghan Civil War. He has repeatedly stated his opposition to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He has fought against women’s rights and free speech initiatives in Afghanistan. He supported the Taliban movement and urged Shia not to resist it. Mohseni heartily approves of a man’s having four wives, and he promotes the right of elderly men to marry young girls— with no age restriction.
Mohseni’s own sexual abuse controversy
During the Afghan Civil War, Mohseni became the focus of a public controversy when one of his field commanders sent his ten year old sister to Mohseni to be instructed in the Koran. The commander was later killed, and many claim Mohseni was involved— after Mohseni married the girl when she turned fourteen.
Given this and other recent government actions, which have included imprisoning journalists, gagging the media, ignoring widespread political corruption, embezzlement, and drug running, it is not surprising that the EU and NATO are now resisting sending more troops to Afghanistan.
This is what we're fighting FOR, under Bush and under Obama, especially per the 3rd article below. We're actually installing the former Taliban warlords INTO positions of power, and defending them against a chunk of the population that hates them and fears them.
We're backing agents of our old Taliban warlord ally, Gulbideen Hekmatyar. Is this astonishing?
This was the main point of the 1978 effort to destroy the left-wing secular government that existed briefly in Afghanistan, when we launched a covert operation to replace it with a theocratic regime that attacked the govt and their Soviet advisors.
So who then are we killing in Afghanistan, with this surge? We must be killing the anti-govt people which includes SECULAR LIBERAL DEMOCRATS who OPPOSE ISLAMISM AND TERROR. (Note, they are absolutely conservative Muslims, but not Islamists.)
This is the exact same thing as we've done in Iraq, turned it into an Iran-backed Shiite theocracy, with torture and killing of "infidels", moderates of both Shia and Sunni background ... including Westernized secular members of the former Baath Party.
Not surprisingly, this is the same as was done in South and Central America, such as in the brutal Christian theocratic dictatorship of General Rios Montt (Pat Robertson's buddy), and other similar situations, such as Argentina under the Generals.
It's like Alice-in-Wonderland, through the looking glass, or Opposites Day.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/02/afghanistan-hazara/phil-zabriskie-text.html
The minority Hazara with their somewhat Asian features.
(see photo on website)
The Outsiders
Set apart by geography and beliefs, oppressed by the Taliban, the Hazara people could be Afghanistan's best hope.
Not if the US can prevent that.
The ruling Taliban—mostly fundamentalist Sunni, ethnic Pashtuns—saw Hazaras as infidels, animals, other. They didn't look the way Afghans should look and didn't worship the way Muslims should worship. A Taliban saying about Afghanistan's non-Pashtun ethnic groups went: "Tajiks to Tajikistan, Uzbeks to Uzbekistan, and Hazaras to goristan," the graveyard. And in fact, when the Buddhas fell (blown to pieces by Taliban missiles), Taliban forces were besieging Hazarajat, burning down villages to render the region uninhabitable.
[...]
On January 8, the Taliban rounded up young Hazara men in Nayak, the district center. "People were thinking they would be taken to court," recalls Sayed Jawhar Amal, a teacher in the nearby village of Kata Khona. "But at 8 a.m. they were killed. All of them." The men were lined up and shot in public view. When elders from Kata Khona inquired about young men from their community, they were also killed. In all, Human Rights Watch concluded, more than 170 were executed in four days.
Taliban forces burned down more than 4,000 homes, shops, and public buildings. They destroyed entire towns in western Bamian Province. Villagers fled into the mountains, then looked down and watched their homes burn.
[...]
After so much hope, so many promises, the Hazaras are feeling ignored by the new government—led as it is by a Pashtun president. (Karzai, our guy) "Anytime we hear news of the Taliban on the radio, our bones turn to water," says Mohsin Moisafid in Kata Khona.
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/04/01/not-a-joke-afghan-lawmakers-outlaw-dancing-on-tv/
Michelle Malkin reports on this but describes it as the "re-Talibanization" of Afghanistan, not that Sharia was actually imposed by the United States with our appointed Afghan "allies".
comment on Malkin's site:
these people dont want to evolve it seems…
No, it's against US foreign policy to permit those who wish to evolve to have the chance. Same as in Latin America. A corrupt theocratic regime of warlords and landlords is better for control and commerce.
comment on Malkin's site:
This demonstrates two points:
The enshrining of Sharia within the new constitution, via a no law which contradicts Islam provision, makes the ruling perfectly understandable – Ayatollah Khomeni did tell us quite clearly that there is “no fun” in Islam.
That the people of Afghanistan would, following their liberation from the Taliban, go right back to Sharia via a * democratic vote does not bode well for George Bush’s grand vision of * democracy in the Middle East.
* read about "democracy" below
http://emperors-clothes.com/news/idlo.htm
1. Top legal group backs Sharia but the news isn't fit to print
========================================================
While doing research on the U.S.-led Empire's support for Muslim extremism in Iraq and Turkey, I chanced upon an important Associated Press (AP) dispatch whose contents were never made public.
Based on that AP dispatch, and some of my own research, this is what I know:
On the 16th and 17th of December, 2002, the powerful IDLO (International Development Law Organization) held a conference in Rome, ostensibly to discuss reforming the Afghan legal system.
This conference, or 'Roundtable' as it was called, was followed by a second conference, sponsored by the Italian government.
The AP reported that after the second conference, the director-general of the IDLO made a statement to the press. He said the conference had endorsed the use of Sharia, or Muslim religious law, as a sound basis for any modern legal system!
Nobody has published this news!
(Some people have a problem with the term "Muslim extremism". Instead, some call it "Islamism" or "Islamist". For the sake of reference, Johann Hari interviewed ex-Jihadists (google that) in England. Very interesting cultural article in itself, look it up. Hari mentioned that 93% of Muslims in London oppose Islamism, and prefer a more liberal and modern Islam, leaving just 7% as extremists, but the extremist gangs are dangerous and intimidating to the non-extremists.)
========================================================
2. Roundtable for Islamism [1]
========================================================
Searching the Web, I located the IDLO Website. There I learned a bit more.
According to a pre-conference mission statement, the purpose of the Roundtable conference was to help a commission trying to reform the Afghan legal system, laying the basis for a democratic, pluralistic society.
This sounds nice, but I have noticed that every time an Empire-controlled organization uses a nice word like 'democratic,' there's a catch: they are about to do something bad to ordinary people.
The IDLO Website has no report about the actual content of the discussions at the Roundtable.
But we can get an idea from the mission statement and list of participants.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=IDLO+afghanistan+constitution+sharia
The mission statement begins:
"Afghanistan, an Islamic nation with a rich legal history, is in the process of ending decades of conflict and has entered a new period of reconstruction." [1A]
'Reconstruction' sounds nice, like 'democratic'. So where's the bad thing that's about to happen to ordinary people?
It's hidden in the phrase, "Islamic nation." For you see, the central issue during those "decades of conflict" was: should Afghanistan be defined in religious terms? Should it be governed by Sharia, Muslim religious law? Which in Afghanistan, and some other places, means domination by the harsh and repressive landlord class associated with Muslim fundamentalism.
(Ditto with the Ayatollahs and their families in Iran -- a wealthy, corrupt landlord class.)
(Johann Hari's interviews include one Jihadist who served a prison sentence in Egypt. There he met former members of Muslim Brotherhood, serving long sentences. In prison, they studied the Q'uran and came to the conclusion that Sharia was a personal decision for each Muslim, and that the idea of a Sharia Law Government was not a prescription for Islam but a historical fact of Mohammed's life at the time. That's what the ex-Jihadist told Hari about what learning played a part in his break with Islamism.)
Moreover, this conflict didn't just happen. The U.S. and its imperial allies in Europe and the Arab world put the whole financial/military/technical power of an Empire into empowering Islamic fundamentalism, and mujahideen terrorists, in Afghanistan. [2]
(Even semi-informed Americans knows this history, but we seldom hear it said this way, and we seem to prefer to forget it.)
(The same was done in Iran, according to William Engdahl describing the Islamic Revolution in Iran that carried out many executions. Scholar of "Orientalism", Bernard Lewis, is the guy who came up with the idea that backing competing, divisive, and unstable Islamic theocracies would give the West a stronger foothold in the Middle East, than backing secular dictatorships or democracies. Henceforth, George Ball and the Bilderberg Group decided to covertly back Ayatollah Kohmeini, under the reign of Jimmy Carter. Look up that brief article too, please, William Engdahl on Iran and Kohmeini. Of course that group with George Ball would have included Zbigniew Brzezinski, author of The Grand Chessboard, which includes the same ideas in somewhat more ambiguous terms.)
It would be nice to believe this policy has changed. Dream on. It is obvious from the list of participants that the IDLO Roundtable took as its starting point that Muslim religious law, Sharia, should govern Afghanistan.
(Do you think the US was not backing this? Do you think the US would have backed the IDLO decision if they approved something different, like a genuine democratic-socialist form of government which was simply informed by Islam, in the manner that US govt is ideally informed by Christian ideas??)
Thus among the 60-odd participants were *none* of the teachers, professors, lawyers, judges or government officials who worked in the *secular* government that ran Afghanistan throughout the 1980s.
Instead there were officials from the current US-installed Muslim fundamentalist government, riddled with former mujahideen terrorists.
(These are the same people who were photographed meeting with Bush and Unocal in Texas, prior to Sept 11, who told a female critic "Your husband must be very disappointed with you." These are the same people who Republican Dana Rohrerbacher met when he trekked through the mountains of Afghanistan trying to set up an oil deal, in violation of the Logan Act.)
There were IDLO and UN officials.
There were government representatives from the US, Japan, Germany, Italy, *and Iran*!
(Germany and Japan sent one representative each but Iran got three!)
There was a large group of pro-Sharia scholars, mainly from the Middle East. But not only. For example, the participant from Harvard Law School was one Frank E. Vogel, the "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Adjunct Professor of Islamic Legal Studies." (!) He runs a Saudi-funded program at Harvard Law. (Just for the record, the Saudis do not fund educational programs out of love of learning. They spend their petrodollars to push Salafi Islam, the Muslim extremism known in the West as Wahabbi.) [H]
The Iranian wing of Muslim fundamentalism was represented by two Sharia judges, Mahmood Akhondy and Mohammad Reza Zandy, and by Ali Gholampour, Third Secretary in the Iranian Embassy in Rome. (The third secretary is often an intelligence post.) (If so, a CIA liaison.)
However, the Iranians had no representatives from U.S. Ivy League schools.
Clearly the conference was not aimed at encouraging Afghanistan to adopt a secular legal system or even to debate the issue. It was organized with an eye to making Sharia respectable in Afghanistan. And not just there:
The conclusions of that meeting were that Islamic law has "all the elements that are really required to underpin a human rights agenda and a modern state agenda which are completely compatible with international standards," said William Loris, director-general of the International Development Law Organization, which trains lawyers and judges in developing countries. [3]
[Excerpt from the AP dispatch ends here]
Please notice that Mr. Loris did not confine his comments to Afghanistan. According to the IDLO chief, the conference ruled that Islamic law, or Sharia, has all the elements needed for *any* "modern state agenda"!
http://emperors-clothes.com/news/idlo.htm
Pretty amazing that nobody knows this story and most people THINK the US is either fighting Islamist extremism or some even think that we're fighting Islam itself. That's what being portrayed. After all, we got troops. We're killing Talibans or "towel-heads", aren't we? Our stated purpose is to oppose the culture that supposedly led to 9-11.
So what's this?
The International Development Law Org, led by the US with the largest representation by Iranian legal scholars, not only backed a repressive Islamic Sharia Law constitution for Afghanistan, but the US also categorially excluded secular and moderate Afghanis from their brief modern era.
The "War on Terror" LOL. We are killing factions of conservative Muslim believers --- the more secular groups that believe in liberal values, democracy, and education. See several stories below. My comments in blue.
Kabulpress comments on the Afghan government's “Rape Law”
The law as a tool of oppression against Afghan Hazara Shia (this article does not say that the US-backed IDLO is behind this transfomation, see below)
http://kabulpress.org/my/spip.php?article3232
95% of the Afghan Shia minority are ethnic Hazaras, and Hazaras have no desire for Islamic Sharia Law. These Sharia Laws were written by the Afghan Pashtun Sunni majority to restrict and discriminate against the Hazara Shia.
The most extreme Sunni Mullah theocrats view the Shia not as Muslims, but as infidels who should be killed, have their property confiscated, and women enslaved. (The Nat Geographic article below describes a further cultural divide between Hazara Shia and other Afghani Shia.)
Mullah M. Asef Mohseni, an elderly white-bearded ayatollah, who blames the spread of AIDS on soap operas and music videos on Afghan TV, has been the primary proponent of the Personal Status Law. (passed by "our" govt) He is ironically a Shia, but is from Pashtun Kandahar, the cradle of the Taliban, and represents the 5% of the Iranian- related Shia who are much closer to their theocratic Sunni Pashtun brethren than the democracy-oriented Hazara. To say this is a Shia-motivated law is a fraud.
Mohseni’s past has aligned closely with the Taliban and been supported by Iran’s theocracy. He is an example of how far the Afghan government (that we installed, with that Unocal consultant as President) leans toward Taliban rule.
Mohseni was the leader of the military mujahidin group Harkat-e-Islami during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He allied with Gulbaden Hekmatyar (Osama Bin Laden's closest ally) and the warlords who wrote the 1993 Afghan constitution which led to the near destruction of Afghanistan and rise of the Taliban. (this is the govt we approve and we now defend)
(The CIA denies that we shipped arms and billions of dollars to Osama Bin Laden, but that's on a technicality. The CIA apparently worked more directly with Gulbideen Hekmatyar. That's according to an article by FAIR and Norman Solomon too. Is it any wonder we can't seem to find Hekmatyar's buddy Osama Bin Laden?)
Mohseni and his puritanical militia were accused of war crimes during and after the Afghan Civil War. He has repeatedly stated his opposition to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He has fought against women’s rights and free speech initiatives in Afghanistan. He supported the Taliban movement and urged Shia not to resist it. Mohseni heartily approves of a man’s having four wives, and he promotes the right of elderly men to marry young girls— with no age restriction.
Mohseni’s own sexual abuse controversy
During the Afghan Civil War, Mohseni became the focus of a public controversy when one of his field commanders sent his ten year old sister to Mohseni to be instructed in the Koran. The commander was later killed, and many claim Mohseni was involved— after Mohseni married the girl when she turned fourteen.
Given this and other recent government actions, which have included imprisoning journalists, gagging the media, ignoring widespread political corruption, embezzlement, and drug running, it is not surprising that the EU and NATO are now resisting sending more troops to Afghanistan.
This is what we're fighting FOR, under Bush and under Obama, especially per the 3rd article below. We're actually installing the former Taliban warlords INTO positions of power, and defending them against a chunk of the population that hates them and fears them.
We're backing agents of our old Taliban warlord ally, Gulbideen Hekmatyar. Is this astonishing?
This was the main point of the 1978 effort to destroy the left-wing secular government that existed briefly in Afghanistan, when we launched a covert operation to replace it with a theocratic regime that attacked the govt and their Soviet advisors.
So who then are we killing in Afghanistan, with this surge? We must be killing the anti-govt people which includes SECULAR LIBERAL DEMOCRATS who OPPOSE ISLAMISM AND TERROR. (Note, they are absolutely conservative Muslims, but not Islamists.)
This is the exact same thing as we've done in Iraq, turned it into an Iran-backed Shiite theocracy, with torture and killing of "infidels", moderates of both Shia and Sunni background ... including Westernized secular members of the former Baath Party.
Not surprisingly, this is the same as was done in South and Central America, such as in the brutal Christian theocratic dictatorship of General Rios Montt (Pat Robertson's buddy), and other similar situations, such as Argentina under the Generals.
It's like Alice-in-Wonderland, through the looking glass, or Opposites Day.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/02/afghanistan-hazara/phil-zabriskie-text.html
The minority Hazara with their somewhat Asian features.
(see photo on website)
The Outsiders
Set apart by geography and beliefs, oppressed by the Taliban, the Hazara people could be Afghanistan's best hope.
Not if the US can prevent that.
The ruling Taliban—mostly fundamentalist Sunni, ethnic Pashtuns—saw Hazaras as infidels, animals, other. They didn't look the way Afghans should look and didn't worship the way Muslims should worship. A Taliban saying about Afghanistan's non-Pashtun ethnic groups went: "Tajiks to Tajikistan, Uzbeks to Uzbekistan, and Hazaras to goristan," the graveyard. And in fact, when the Buddhas fell (blown to pieces by Taliban missiles), Taliban forces were besieging Hazarajat, burning down villages to render the region uninhabitable.
[...]
On January 8, the Taliban rounded up young Hazara men in Nayak, the district center. "People were thinking they would be taken to court," recalls Sayed Jawhar Amal, a teacher in the nearby village of Kata Khona. "But at 8 a.m. they were killed. All of them." The men were lined up and shot in public view. When elders from Kata Khona inquired about young men from their community, they were also killed. In all, Human Rights Watch concluded, more than 170 were executed in four days.
Taliban forces burned down more than 4,000 homes, shops, and public buildings. They destroyed entire towns in western Bamian Province. Villagers fled into the mountains, then looked down and watched their homes burn.
[...]
After so much hope, so many promises, the Hazaras are feeling ignored by the new government—led as it is by a Pashtun president. (Karzai, our guy) "Anytime we hear news of the Taliban on the radio, our bones turn to water," says Mohsin Moisafid in Kata Khona.
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/04/01/not-a-joke-afghan-lawmakers-outlaw-dancing-on-tv/
Michelle Malkin reports on this but describes it as the "re-Talibanization" of Afghanistan, not that Sharia was actually imposed by the United States with our appointed Afghan "allies".
comment on Malkin's site:
these people dont want to evolve it seems…
No, it's against US foreign policy to permit those who wish to evolve to have the chance. Same as in Latin America. A corrupt theocratic regime of warlords and landlords is better for control and commerce.
comment on Malkin's site:
This demonstrates two points:
The enshrining of Sharia within the new constitution, via a no law which contradicts Islam provision, makes the ruling perfectly understandable – Ayatollah Khomeni did tell us quite clearly that there is “no fun” in Islam.
That the people of Afghanistan would, following their liberation from the Taliban, go right back to Sharia via a * democratic vote does not bode well for George Bush’s grand vision of * democracy in the Middle East.
* read about "democracy" below
http://emperors-clothes.com/news/idlo.htm
1. Top legal group backs Sharia but the news isn't fit to print
========================================================
While doing research on the U.S.-led Empire's support for Muslim extremism in Iraq and Turkey, I chanced upon an important Associated Press (AP) dispatch whose contents were never made public.
Based on that AP dispatch, and some of my own research, this is what I know:
On the 16th and 17th of December, 2002, the powerful IDLO (International Development Law Organization) held a conference in Rome, ostensibly to discuss reforming the Afghan legal system.
This conference, or 'Roundtable' as it was called, was followed by a second conference, sponsored by the Italian government.
The AP reported that after the second conference, the director-general of the IDLO made a statement to the press. He said the conference had endorsed the use of Sharia, or Muslim religious law, as a sound basis for any modern legal system!
Nobody has published this news!
(Some people have a problem with the term "Muslim extremism". Instead, some call it "Islamism" or "Islamist". For the sake of reference, Johann Hari interviewed ex-Jihadists (google that) in England. Very interesting cultural article in itself, look it up. Hari mentioned that 93% of Muslims in London oppose Islamism, and prefer a more liberal and modern Islam, leaving just 7% as extremists, but the extremist gangs are dangerous and intimidating to the non-extremists.)
========================================================
2. Roundtable for Islamism [1]
========================================================
Searching the Web, I located the IDLO Website. There I learned a bit more.
According to a pre-conference mission statement, the purpose of the Roundtable conference was to help a commission trying to reform the Afghan legal system, laying the basis for a democratic, pluralistic society.
This sounds nice, but I have noticed that every time an Empire-controlled organization uses a nice word like 'democratic,' there's a catch: they are about to do something bad to ordinary people.
The IDLO Website has no report about the actual content of the discussions at the Roundtable.
But we can get an idea from the mission statement and list of participants.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=IDLO+afghanistan+constitution+sharia
The mission statement begins:
"Afghanistan, an Islamic nation with a rich legal history, is in the process of ending decades of conflict and has entered a new period of reconstruction." [1A]
'Reconstruction' sounds nice, like 'democratic'. So where's the bad thing that's about to happen to ordinary people?
It's hidden in the phrase, "Islamic nation." For you see, the central issue during those "decades of conflict" was: should Afghanistan be defined in religious terms? Should it be governed by Sharia, Muslim religious law? Which in Afghanistan, and some other places, means domination by the harsh and repressive landlord class associated with Muslim fundamentalism.
(Ditto with the Ayatollahs and their families in Iran -- a wealthy, corrupt landlord class.)
(Johann Hari's interviews include one Jihadist who served a prison sentence in Egypt. There he met former members of Muslim Brotherhood, serving long sentences. In prison, they studied the Q'uran and came to the conclusion that Sharia was a personal decision for each Muslim, and that the idea of a Sharia Law Government was not a prescription for Islam but a historical fact of Mohammed's life at the time. That's what the ex-Jihadist told Hari about what learning played a part in his break with Islamism.)
Moreover, this conflict didn't just happen. The U.S. and its imperial allies in Europe and the Arab world put the whole financial/military/technical power of an Empire into empowering Islamic fundamentalism, and mujahideen terrorists, in Afghanistan. [2]
(Even semi-informed Americans knows this history, but we seldom hear it said this way, and we seem to prefer to forget it.)
(The same was done in Iran, according to William Engdahl describing the Islamic Revolution in Iran that carried out many executions. Scholar of "Orientalism", Bernard Lewis, is the guy who came up with the idea that backing competing, divisive, and unstable Islamic theocracies would give the West a stronger foothold in the Middle East, than backing secular dictatorships or democracies. Henceforth, George Ball and the Bilderberg Group decided to covertly back Ayatollah Kohmeini, under the reign of Jimmy Carter. Look up that brief article too, please, William Engdahl on Iran and Kohmeini. Of course that group with George Ball would have included Zbigniew Brzezinski, author of The Grand Chessboard, which includes the same ideas in somewhat more ambiguous terms.)
It would be nice to believe this policy has changed. Dream on. It is obvious from the list of participants that the IDLO Roundtable took as its starting point that Muslim religious law, Sharia, should govern Afghanistan.
(Do you think the US was not backing this? Do you think the US would have backed the IDLO decision if they approved something different, like a genuine democratic-socialist form of government which was simply informed by Islam, in the manner that US govt is ideally informed by Christian ideas??)
Thus among the 60-odd participants were *none* of the teachers, professors, lawyers, judges or government officials who worked in the *secular* government that ran Afghanistan throughout the 1980s.
Instead there were officials from the current US-installed Muslim fundamentalist government, riddled with former mujahideen terrorists.
(These are the same people who were photographed meeting with Bush and Unocal in Texas, prior to Sept 11, who told a female critic "Your husband must be very disappointed with you." These are the same people who Republican Dana Rohrerbacher met when he trekked through the mountains of Afghanistan trying to set up an oil deal, in violation of the Logan Act.)
There were IDLO and UN officials.
There were government representatives from the US, Japan, Germany, Italy, *and Iran*!
(Germany and Japan sent one representative each but Iran got three!)
There was a large group of pro-Sharia scholars, mainly from the Middle East. But not only. For example, the participant from Harvard Law School was one Frank E. Vogel, the "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Adjunct Professor of Islamic Legal Studies." (!) He runs a Saudi-funded program at Harvard Law. (Just for the record, the Saudis do not fund educational programs out of love of learning. They spend their petrodollars to push Salafi Islam, the Muslim extremism known in the West as Wahabbi.) [H]
The Iranian wing of Muslim fundamentalism was represented by two Sharia judges, Mahmood Akhondy and Mohammad Reza Zandy, and by Ali Gholampour, Third Secretary in the Iranian Embassy in Rome. (The third secretary is often an intelligence post.) (If so, a CIA liaison.)
However, the Iranians had no representatives from U.S. Ivy League schools.
Clearly the conference was not aimed at encouraging Afghanistan to adopt a secular legal system or even to debate the issue. It was organized with an eye to making Sharia respectable in Afghanistan. And not just there:
The conclusions of that meeting were that Islamic law has "all the elements that are really required to underpin a human rights agenda and a modern state agenda which are completely compatible with international standards," said William Loris, director-general of the International Development Law Organization, which trains lawyers and judges in developing countries. [3]
[Excerpt from the AP dispatch ends here]
Please notice that Mr. Loris did not confine his comments to Afghanistan. According to the IDLO chief, the conference ruled that Islamic law, or Sharia, has all the elements needed for *any* "modern state agenda"!
http://emperors-clothes.com/news/idlo.htm
posted by dilbertgeg at 10:03 PM
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