A couple of updates related to Algeria. One set discusses events in country, where the guerilla war between the government and the al-Qaeda affiliated GSPC continues apace.
The other item discusses the Algerian population in France, and includes some excerpts from a survey conducted in 2001 among the children of Algerian immigrants. What follows is a deep, complex, and unflinchingly honest analysis of France's extreme social fissures - including both LePen's Front National and the quasi-Islamist hatred of both Jews and the West simmering in its Algerian inner city neighbourhoods. If France's situation interests you, this is really a must-read.
First, the report from Algeria:
bq. Dan Darling: "As I noted before, al-Qaeda's Algerian arm is among the most numerous and the most ruthless of bin Laden's legions. They've also been busy lately, taking advantage of the temporary loss of the Algerian government's ability to police the rural areas while the military is overseeing relief efforts in the capital from the recent earthquake. The GSPC killed four civilians on June 19, then massacred a family of five in Merjet el-Abed on June 23, and finally killed a family of eight in Tablat and abducted a 24 year-old woman. Like Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, the GSPC adheres to the barbaric practice of taking young women captured in their attacks prisoner to be either ransomed, married to members of the group, or gang-raped and then killed."
Maybe Algerian women should ask themselves "why do they rape us," and begin negotiating a roadmap to peace in order to stop the cycle of violence.
Meanwhile, the depth of France's own Algerian issues is well conveyed in Jacques Tarnero's "The Occupied Territories of Arab Imagination", which includes a survey of interviews conducted with young children of Algerian immigrants. What follows is a good analysis of France's extreme social fissures, including both LePen and the quasi-Islamist hatred of both Jews and the West simmering in its Algerian inner city neighbourhoods. Very much worth a read - and a big thank you to WATCH/ and Douglas Gillison for the translation.
Well, 20 teens and post-teens in Maghrebi 'hood in France do not a "threat" make. Besides, some of the comments about Judaism were quite positive.
Does anyone ever think that maybe what the US is doing and saying is threatening to other countries, and not just the "axis of evil"?
For another perspective, the incomparable William Pfaff commented on the French and European threat today:
"Those Americans who still think that current trans-Atlantic differences are a relatively harmless disagreement - with Europeans "from Venus," possessing virtuous illusions about international legality and multilateral institutions - are today being told that they are badly mistaken.
A prominent theme of neoconservative writing and television talk is that a Franco-German-dominated European Union, rebuilt according to the new Giscardian constitution currently under debate, threatens to become "superpower Europe" and a mortal danger to the United States.
The New Republic, an influential Washington weekly, has just announced that "America must wake up!" to the danger from an expanded and united Europe and the newly strengthened European currency, the euro.
Few Americans acknowledge any moral weight in "old" Europe.
It may even be too late, one author claims. Britain, Spain, Italy and others who supported Washington in the Iraq war may next time be dragged into the Franco-German orbit by economic integration and dependence, and other constraints of EU membership.
Another writer warns that Europe's low growth and productivity statistics conceal the great advantage a stable Europe possesses over an unstable and erratic U.S. economy, undermined by corruption and excess.
France is systematically denigrated, as to a lesser extent is Germany - Germany is thought salvageable, or open to intimidation, once Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is gone. France is portrayed as suffering from "a profound pathology," and America's enemy. In Washington power-corridor leaks to the press, in neo-conservative magazines and on the Internet, France is said to be driven by hatred, national vanity and the personal vanity of Jacques Chirac, and as allied with the radical Arab world out of fear of France's unassimilated Muslim population.
It is described as incorrigibly and dangerously anti-Semitic. The French, like the Germans (the Daniel Goldhagen argument), are described as instinctively anti-Semitic and culturally disposed to totalitarianism.
France even is "not a Western country anymore" since in "many" cities "no teenage girl can go out in the evening, at least without a full burqa." (These quotes are from the neo-con Web site www.FrontPageMagazine.com, whose contributors include quite well-known figures, including some from the political right in France itself).
This kind of nonsense sets the tone. Few Americans acknowledge any intellectual or moral weight or merit on the "old" European side, and certainly not on that of France."
The complete article:
http://www.iht.com/articles/101523.html
you fool should not temper with the elemnets that lie in the algerian teretory. y people dont even know what lie there. in the far desrets of algeria is a great fighter by the name of al sidio. he is not pleased by your comments. i am his meer messenger and follower. al sidio is a great man that beleives in allah and is a great and very "powerful" fighter. if u wich to combat him. i asure you that you will lose! thank you for your time of reading this letter and hope u follow his orders.