Benazir Bhutto Killed in Pakistan

I am looking for translators to translate this post into German. Email me if you are interested.

By now many of you may have heard the news that Benazir Bhutto has been killed by a shooter - suicide bomber in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Rawalpindi is one of Pakistan's major cities over in the East.

She got back in her car after a wild rally in the city, then stood up inside the bulletproof vehicle to wave to the crowd. A man raced through the crowd, pulled out a gun and fired two shots, killing Bhutto. Then he blew himself up, just to make sure she was dead.

Bhutto's vehicle sped off to the hospital, where it was originally reported that she had two bullet wounds, one in the head and one in the neck. Later reports said that there were no bullets or shrapnel wounds in her head.

Even later reports said that she died when her head hit the lever of the sun roof of her vehicle. However, Bhutto's family and supporters are continuing to say that she had gunshot wounds.

The most recent news, via Juan Cole's fantastic blog, is that the Pakistani government is wildly backtracking from its claim that Bhutto died of a concussion after video surfaced showing a shooter firing at her from only a few feet away, after which her body heaves up and falls down as if it had been hit by bullets - all of this before the explosion hits.

Footage of Bhutto's assassination is here , and the gunman can be seen in the video firing several shots. The gunman is circled in red in the video. In this video, you can see a man in sunglasses pointing a gun at Bhutto from a very short distance away. 20 people were killed in the blast.

The assassination occurred just 12 days before a major election that President Musharaff was expected to lose. Benazir's supporters were quick to blame Musharaff for the blast, and Bhutto herself had previously said that she would blame Musharaff if she were killed.

Bhutto's entourage had repeatedly requested a greater security detail, but the requests had all been denied. Nevertheless, a bit too much is being made of this, as Bhutto was surrounded by bodyguards and was traveling in a bulletproof vehicle. She also had a security detail of up to 700-800 men, five of whom were killed in the attack.

The greater security they requested was along the lines of bombproof vehicles and jammers to stop bombings. But jammers are no good against a suicide bomber.

The day before, shots had been fired at Nawaz Sharif, another opposition candidate. The shots missed Sharif, but killed four of his bodyguards.

Bhutto had just returned from exile to contest the elections in the first democratic opening since Musharaff seized power in 2001. On October 18, soon after her return from exile, another suicide bomber had attacked her entourage, killing 140 people but narrowly missing Bhutto. In that attack, she had a security detail of up to 5,000-6,000, in multiple layers, yet a multi-pronged attack got through anyway.

Another Al Qaeda banner, this one with Bin Laden and a map of Iraq done in the colors of the Iraqi flag. bin Laden is an Arab nationalist in addition to being an Islamist. This paints his hatred for Iran in vivid colors. You can't understand bin Laden well until you grasp his Arab nationalist dimension.

Al Qaeda was suspected in that attack, and Al Qaeda quickly claimed responsibility for this attack on one of their websites and in a phone call to a Greek newspaper. In addition, the head of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, claimed responsibility for the attack in a phone call to Asia Times reporter Syed Saleem Shahzad.

Yazid said that a Punjabi who was a former member of Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, a fanatical Sunni group dedicated to killing Shiites, was part of a three man squad that carried out the operation on Al Qaeda's orders. One man was the shooter and bomber, a second played an unknown role, and a third was possibly a spotter.

The operation was highly professional, but Al Qaeda is a professional military organization, and furthermore, there are many Pakistanis, including former Pakistani military, including Special Forces, in its ranks. Al Qaeda and related Islamists have been threatening to kill Bhutto since 1992.

An arrest in Karachi revealed a plot involving hundreds of cells throughout Pakistan involved in tracking targets and sending out death squads to kill them. The targets included Bhutto, Musharaff and other top government figures.

An Al Qaeda banner from an Al Qaeda website, tajdeed.net. I doubt if it is up anymore. Note the emphasis on Saudi Arabia with bin Laden next to it. AQ is first and foremost a Saudi organization.

Bhutto was considered even more of an enemy to AQ and Pakistan's Islamists than Musharaff, but Al Qaeda has tried to kill Musharaff a few times already in the past couple of years, since Musharaff has decided to wage war on Pakistan's armed Islamists. But Musharaff has really only gone after the Islamists to do Washington's bidding.

A classic Al Qaeda banner, with the Arabian Peninsula, the crossed swords, and the black flag of Islam. These motifs are all frequently seen in Al Qaeda banners.

Every now and again, Pakistan seems to catch these major AQ operatives out of the blue, as if they were pulling them out of a hat. I am convinced that Pakistani intelligence (ISI) knows where most of the top AQ operatives are, but only arrests them once in a while as a show to show the US that it is cooperating in the Terror War.

Another Al Qaeda banner from the same site, this one picturing Zawahiri, bin Laden's right-hand man and the one who has significantly radicalized him and set him into motion that he may as well be called "the brains behind bin Laden". Zawahiri can generally be found in the Bajour Agency or across the border in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has pretty much ceded a number of its Western Frontier Provinces and agencies to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Particularly strong formations exist in North and South Waziristan and the Bajour Agency.

Another Al Qaeda logo. Note the horse. This horse is often seen on AQ logos. I am not sure what it means, but it is one of their motifs.

The Dir District is basically off-limits to US and Pakistani forces, and I am convinced that this is where Osama bin Laden has been for the past couple of years, where he is being protected by a radical Wahhabi preacher. No one can go near that province without AQ knowing about it.

The bodies of spies hang in the trees for months on the main roads into the area. Mercenaries tracking bin Laden are convinced he is there (in fact, there have been photos of him posing with the radical preacher in the past few years).

A street scene in Dir, the main city in the Dir District. A PBS crew went here to film "In Search of Bin Laden" a couple of years back, but they left after a couple of days due to the very bad vibes in the place.

Part of the year, bin Laden goes across the border to Nuristan in Afghanistan. In the past year or so, more districts have come under AQ/Taliban control. The Dera Ismail Khan, Tank, Peshawar, Bannu, Kohat, Laki Marwat and Dir Districts and the Khyber, Kurram and Mohmand Agencies have all fallen. The Orakzai Agency and the Hangu, Mardan, Malakand, Chitral and Charsadda Districts are all threatened.

In recent days, the Swat District fell and there was heavy fighting as government troops tried to take it back. Later, the Shangla District fell.

A really nice map of the Northwest Frontier Provinces and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) showing the provinces and agencies named above. Here is a great map of the Dir-Bajaur-Nuristan-Peshawar-Swat Valley area.

It is hard to say whether or not Musharaff was involved in killing Bhutto. The problem is that the ISI is completely tied up in the Taliban and possibly even Al Qaeda. Well, some of the ISI. Maybe.

Another Al Qaeda banner with a number of their martyrs. I can't really identify most of them, but Sheik Yassin of Hamas is second from right. Interesting that Yassin is revered by Al Qaeda, but while Hamas and Al Qaeda are not sister groups, they are uncomfortable close for my tastes.

But then we don't really know, because the ISI is one of the most opaque spy agencies around. For many years, Pakistan cultivated "the jihadis" as an auxiliary wing of the Pakistani armed forces. To understand why, we must understand Pakistani geopolitics.

Pakistan's number one deadly enemy is India and vice versa. The tragedy that set all of this nonsense in motion was that of Kashmir. When Pakistan and India split in 1947 after the British left, 90% of the Kashmiri population voted to go to Pakistan (the population was about 90% Muslim, but there were significant populations of Hindus called Pandits and even Buddhists).

But the governor of the province was a Hindu and he nullified the vote. Pakistan and India have fought a few wars over the Kashmir since. In 1949, the UN ruled that Kashmiris should be allowed to have a plebiscite to determine whether they want to stay with India, go independent, or go with Pakistan.

India has ignored the resolution ever since. An insurgency started in Kashmir after a couple of decades and it has smoldered ever since. Pakistan has pumped many jihadis into Kashmir, but there are also many locals who want to leave India.

Truth is, Pakistan is a lot more frightened of India than vice versa. Pakistan is terrified of India. We need to keep that in mind. All of Pakistan's military strategy revolves around the omnipresent conflict with India. It colors everything. Even support for the Taliban in Afghanistan was colored by this conflict.

Pakistan preferred anti-Indian Islamists it could control instead of the possibility of of a nationalist Pashtun government, as Pashtun nationalists have long campaigned for a Pashtunistan, encompassing Pashtun regions on both sides of the border. Such a new state would cleave off a good part of Pakistan. As Pakistan is threatened by India, she dares not lose any territory at all, as a smaller state will make her less secure.

Now that Karzai is in power, his regime is seen as pro-Indian, or at least not anti-Indian enough. Plus, he is a Pashtun. Bad. Possibility of Pashtun nationalism. So the ISI is to a greater or lesser degree running the Taliban insurgency inside Afghanistan for the reasons described above.

Note: After this post was published, TGGP argued on his excellent blog that my characterization of this situation in this post does not make sense. That is, since the Taliban are themselves Pashtuns, they must favor Pashtunistan, hence why would they ISI support them and dislike Karzai? But Pashtunistan has always been supported by the more secular Pashtuns.

Yes, they do exist. It is false to see the Pashtuns are all Islamists. There was a huge rally the other day for Benazir's party, the PPP, in the capital of the Bajour Agency, which is virtually run by Al Qaeda. The Pashtun areas area full of all sorts of folks, all the way from Al Qaeda Islamists to ardent secularists.

Instead of seeing Pakistan as Islamist-overrun, it is better to see all this conflict instead as a civil war inside of Pakistan, with Islamists fighting seculars.

Now onto TGGP's complaint. Karzai represents the more secular-minded Pashtuns who have tended to promote Pashtunistan. As an alternative to that and as a way to co-opt the Pashtunistan notion, the ISI promoted the Taliban. Pashtuns, yes, but so Islamist that they have had the very notion of nationalism, not to mention Pashtun nationalism, deracinated from their very being.

These guys are with Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda barely believes in nation-states. They want to more or less dissolve them into a religious caliphate empire. Nation-states are secular, man-made institutions that privilege man's flawed laws and rule over God's, hence they are rejected.

As quivers in its bow in the war against India, Pakistan has long cultivated the "jihadi option". At various times in its history, Pakistan has "called in the jihadis" to perform various nefarious deeds for the state. Pakistan has always thought it could control the jihadis, but recently they have veered out of control and area attacking the host.

Training little kids to be terrorists. Wonderful! Look at the proud father beaming at his future suicide bombers. This is typical fare for an Al Qaeda site. They think child abuse like this is cool.

There is also the question of domestic Pakistani politics. This snake's nest is home to a vicious political zero-sum game where rulers have been having their rivals killed for decades now. Bhutto's father, a former prime minister, was himself arrested by a government that succeeded him.

Soon afterwards, in 1979, he was hanged by his political rivals on charges of "conspiracy to murder" and Benazir was tossed in prison for a couple of years. Bhutto's hanging led to massive riots similar to those taking place as I write this in the wake of Benazir's killing. Who knows if Bhutto was guilty of the charges, but his killers surely were.

The party founded by Bhutto, himself a wealthy semi-feudal landowner of huge plots of land, is called the Pakistan People's Party. It is nominally a leftwing socialist party, and it's probably the best large Pakistani party from a progressive point of view.

Meanwhile, Musharaff is a member of a group of people called Mohajirs. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the famous father of the Muslim nuclear bomb, is another Mohajir.

The Mohajirs , from the Arab word for refugee, immigrant or emigrant (in this case, refugee) - muhajir - are Pakistani Muslims who fled India for Pakistan during the communal slaughter in 1947 as Hindus fled Pakistan and Muslims fled India, with both sides massacring hundreds of thousands of the other side in the process. A multiracial group, the one thing that the Mohajirs had in common in India was the Urdu language.

One would think that Mohajirs, the scars of Pakistan's baptism of blood, would have been welcomed in Pakistan. Not so. They claim to have experienced long-term discrimination inside Pakistan, but the sort of discrimination they experienced is the sort that Jews, Asians and Whites in the US complain about, that is, reverse discrimination.

The Mohajirs who fled India were much more educated than the people already residing in the new state of Pakistan, hence they were overrepresented in the better jobs. A quota system that amounted to reverse discrimination was put into place to limit the Mohajirs to 7% of such jobs, the proportion of their percentage in the population.

This reverse discrimination angered the Mohajirs so much that they formed an anti-discrimination movement in 1986 that culminated in a Mohajir political party. Mutahida Quami Movement, or MQM. This party was formed by Altaf Hussein. Hussein is presently a refugee in London, and he is regarded as a political terrorist (guilty of killing his political enemies) by many rivals.

As Pakistan is one of only two nations on Earth formed as explicitly religious states - Israel the Jewish state is the other - the importance of Islam to Pakistan cannot be underestimated. The narrative of the Mohajirs is that they sacrificed all - including 1 million lives - for Islam, in fleeing India at great cost in life and suffering, all for the sake of Islam. So, in effect, they see themselves as the super-martyrs for Islam.

They also formed their own clique that looks out for its own interests and no one else's, similar to many caste-type groups in Pakistan. Hence, Mohajirs in general and Musharaff's party in particular are not well-liked by non-Mohajirs.

Now that you have some background on some of the events in the backdrop of Bhutto's assassination, you can reach your own conclusions about who killed her and why. At first I was not sure who did it, but now I am certain that Al Qaeda killed her.

The Pakistani government is blaming Baitullah Mehsud, a Pakistani Taliban leader in South Waziristan. Mehsud had threatened to kill Bhutto before she even returned home. He is also believed to be responsible for an increasingly sophisticated and frightening series of bombings, including suicide attacks, against government and military targets.

A number of these attacks have occurred in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, where the Pakistani military and the ISI have their headquarters. At least three of the attacks is thought to be have been against Pakistan's nuclear sites. As of this fall, Al Qaeda has vowed to target Pakistan's nuclear program.

So, yes, Al Qaeda did the attack, but were they alone? The tangled web of AQ's tentacles wrap deeply into the ISI and the "jihadi option" of the Pakistani state.

An Al Qaeda logo with bin Laden, the black flag of Islam, a photo of the planes heading into the World Trade Center and US flags at half mast after the attack. More typical Al Qaeda themes. Note that bin Laden is always beaming charismatically in all of these banners.

Charismatic portrayals of its heroes is typical of these AQ productions. One one level is humanizes them and makes them attractive, and on the other it almost makes them saint-like. To AQ's core followers, bin Laden is nearly a Mahdi.

The Pakistani state is capable of killing political rivals, and has done so in the past.

There are many Taliban and Al Qaeda sympathizers in the Pakistani military and ISI, and it is possible that elements in the military and intelligence services may have been involved in the attack due to their alliance with Al Qaeda. However, I do not believe that Bhutto's non-Islamist rivals in Pakistani politics had anything to do with her murder. That includes Musharaff.

An excellent piece by Pakistani Leftist Tariq Ali goes into a lot more details about Pakistani politics than I did here.

Meanwhile, as we ponder this mystery, Pakistan, an extremely unstable state with 50 nuclear weapons, is convulsed with wild riots. One of the dangerous and unstable states on Earth just got a lot more so. Hang onto your seats for the wild ride.

A Cold, Wet California Winter Ahead?

Sometimes you have to wonder if nature is just smarter than humans. Even at this late date, we are so limited in our abilities to predict the weather. Yet the lesser critters, even something so stupid as a bug or a squirrel, sometimes seem to be smarter than all the world's weathermen and their computers combined. But are they really?

At the local college, the observant rural students have been coming in during the summer reporting that, based on some sort of observation involving woolly caterpillars, this coming winter is going to be very cold and wet. The forecasting has something to do with the ratio of red banding to black background on the woollybear's body.

A woolly caterpillar turns into one of these moths. This is an Isabella Moth.

In 1948, William Curran, an entomologist at the Museum of Natural History in New York undertook a study of woollybears and subsequent winter weather. After 10 years, the woollybears showed 70% accuracy in predicting winter weather conditions, which is a pretty good rate.

However, there were problems with this study. In fact, more recent research has crushed the notion that the colors or hairs on a woollybear's back are able to predict anything about the coming winter.

Woollybears don't predict a damn thing, unfortunately. But they sure are nice to look at.

I am a bit ashamed to admit that when I was a boy, undergoing the masculine socialization that forges one into a man, my brothers and I used to torture these bugs. Specifically, we had "bullfights" with them, whereby we would put the woolybear in the "bullring" (a cleared dirt area) and then attack it by throwing "picadors" at them. That's kind of a sick joke.

Picadors are the spears the bullfighter uses to spear the bull while he fights it. Those are the spears you see hanging out of the bull's body as the fight goes on. In our case, "picadors" were, ludicrously, large, thick nails that we had stolen from the workmen building the housing tract in back of us.

It sounds gruesome, but I think this kind of trial by fire socialization is necessary for a masculine self-image. There were boys I grew up who liked to stay inside baking muffins with Mom, and I was always glad I never took that route. I figure they either ended up gay or bi or if not, they had self-image problems in adulthood. Males ignore masculinity at their peril.

Now, from Beasore Meadows east of here at 7000 feet in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, we hear of some genius squirrels blessed with the gift of precognition. The squirrels at Beasore have been going "absolutely nuts", says the report. That means they have been going crazy storing up acorns and whatnot in their little stashes. They do that when they think it is going to be a cold and hard winter ahead. Smart lil critters, eh?

Jones Store at Beasore Meadows. Beautiful, huh? I had a friend a while back who was not getting along well with his wife. He had basically given up on women altogether in his late 40's by then. He could not just move out, so he took up a new residence here at Beasore in the off-season. He would drive all the way down to Oakhurst in the daytime every day and hang out at the coffee shop all day with us.

Then in the evening he would head back up to Beasore and spend the night up there at 7000 feet. He was either alone there, or sometimes there was one other guy living there too. I thought it sounded horribly lonely, but he said it was paradise. Shades of Thoreau?

Yet the American Museum of Natural History claims that not only woollybears, but no animals whatsoever, are able to predict the weather.

But then there are those tantalizing stories about fish, snowshoe hares and black bears, from Alaskan Indians, which, while we are tempted to discount them, let us recall that they are based on centuries of observation of animal behaviors, and that observation is the backbone of any scientific research.

Here it is, the second to last day of summer, and it has already been unseasonably cold for a few days now at least. Supposedly it snowed higher up, above 6000 feet, which is a little unusual for September. I took a drive up Highway 41 to Fish Camp and looked at the surrounding peaks but I could not see a trace of snow. Supposedly it all melted off right away.

This is the Marriott Hotel at Fish Camp. It's quite expensive at about $200-300 a night. I complained about that once, saying that why should only rich people be able to stay in the mountains, and a friend of mine who worked there called me a "Maoist" for saying that. America is a funny place.

A bed and breakfast in Fish Camp, California, just outside Yosemite National Park.

The Big Creek Bed and Breakfast in Fish Camp during the winter. Nice, eh?

This is what Highway 41 just south of Fish Camp looks like in wintertime. This part of the Sierra National Forest is an interesting place. The Southwestern Willow Flycatcher, an endangered species that is extremely rare in these parts, has been spotted at a campground north of Fish Camp during the 1990's.

This bird has been going extinct in the Sierras purely due to high elevation cattle grazing (an insanely destructive process here in the Sierras) and for no other reason. Forest Service "biologists" (some of the biggest liars I have ever met) have been going into contortions to deny this obvious fact for many years.


The Pacific Fisher, a rare furbearer that desperately needs to be listed on the Endangered Species Act, was recorded during the 1990's at Westfall Ranger Station, near where the snowy photo above was taken. I am amazed that fishers have survived up there at all. They are going extinct in the Sierras primarily due to loss of old growth forest habitat.

Their habitat is becoming so fragmented that either the females or the males (I forget which) are having to enlarge their territories in order to get enough food to survive. Since their territory is so much larger than it ought to be due to crappy habitat, the critters expend so much energy running around their territory stuffing their faces that they do not have enough energy left over to mate. Hell of a way to go extinct, huh? Work yourself to death and no sex either.

Even if you spend a lot of time hiking in the mountains, consider yourself lucky if you ever see a fisher.

An interesting fact about these predators is that there is just about no North American mammal that can climb trees, jump from tree to tree, etc., like these things do. Some of the reports of early naturalists are just amazing. Also, they don't have anything to do with fishing. It's just a stupid name that stuck for some reason.

Bad winter? Or good winter? We are coming off one of the worst drought years in decades. At least the fires are apparently over!

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Free Market Starvation

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated January 23, 2008:

The power of capitalist propaganda is immense. According to the ruling class media, the only system that starves anyone anymore is Communism.

One hears this platitude over and over - Communism = starvation. It is true that 600,000 have starved to death in North Korea since the 1990's. However, 14 million starve to death every year in the world - mostly in South Asia but also 1 million in Latin America - almost all under capitalist regimes. Not one word of this from the ruling class mouthpieces.

This has been going since at least 1986 (when the figure was calculated) with no end in sight.

The Soviet Union and China are now synonymous with starvation. There was a famine in the Ukraine in 1932 that killed 1.5 million people. Previously, during the Russian Civil War, there was a famine in 1921 that killed 9 million people. It is a simple truth that under Czardom, the peasant never had enough to eat. His life expectancy was a mere 32 years and lack of food played a role here.

Under Communism, the peasant had plenty of food to eat for the first time in centuries. In the early 1930's, the Soviet Union saw the largest harvests in its history, big harvests that continued for decades. All of this is forgotten, and all we know is famine, famine, famine. One wonders how Stalin doubled life expectancy in the USSR while the people starved.

In China again, we hear that Communism starved the people. In 1958, it is true, there was a terrible famine, the worst in modern history, mostly caused by the stupidity of over-procurement by the state, that killed an astounding 15 million people.

Yet year and year out, millions of lives were being saved every year in China. Under Communism, with the exception of 1958, the Chinese peasants finally had enough food to eat. Like the Russian peasants, starvation and lack of food had stalked the Chinese peasant for centuries.

By the early 1970's, the problem of food in China was finally solved for the first time in centuries. As with the USSR, China also doubled life expectancy under Mao. Once again, one wonders how this was achieved if the people were "starving" as the anti-Communists claim.

In Vietnam in 1944-45, 2 million died during deliberate starvation by French and Japanese capitalist forces when they seized the rice crop. One never hears of this famine. Only Communists starve people.

Cuba has recently lowered malnutrition to 2%, the lowest rate in Latin America. More here and here. It is amazing how they can do that while they starve the population, no?

Here is a Cuban newspaper about how, in Cuba, the right to eat is elevated above the right to shoot off one's mouth. In fact, the paper suggests intriguingly that the limits on free speech in Cuba are directly attributable to the government's ability to feed everyone. The suggestion is that if you let everyone shoot off their mouth, food will be snatched from the mouths of babes:

Ironically, the country that supposedly limits the freedom of its citizens is the only one in Latin America where there is not malnutrition," wrote Periodico 26, an official publication in backwater Las Tunas province, on Feb. 6, alluding to a recent United Nations report stating that only two percent of Cuban children had some kind of nutrient deficit.

"What is portrayed in the U.S. media as an aggression against an individual's free will, is in fact a synonym for nutritional security for most Cubans." The newspaper goes on to say that free meals provided at work centers and schools add another crucial component to Cubans' diets.

In Vietnam, the malnutrition rate of 18% is about 1/2 the Thai rate of 36%, one positive aspect of Vietnamese socialism. When one thinks of Thailand, one never suspects that 1/3 of the population doesn't get enough food to eat. All one thinks of are tourists, skyscrapers, traffic jams, girly bars, beaches and elephants.

In Pakistan, 62% of all children are already stunted in growth by the tender age of five. But the media tells us that stunting only occurs in North Korea. After all, it is only Communism that starves the people.

Let us focus our attention on the capitalist showcase of Niger, in northern Africa, where the human-hunting industry, the most profitable enterprise capitalism has ever developed, yet festers.

Here capitalism has blessed this blighted and unstable land with the worst human development indicators on Earth, where 40% of children are chronically undernourished (And that is in a bountiful harvest!), where the literacy rate is a Medieval 17%, life expectancy is a tragic 44.7 years, the infant mortality rate is an outrageous 151.8 per 1000, and Niger is bested by only one other country when it comes to killing little kids under age 5.

What is killing the children of Niger, or for that matter, kids across the Sahel? None other than the free market. Recently, free market fundamentalists convinced the government to deregulate the grain market, leading to major fluctuations in grain prices. When prices are high, they are so high that families could not even afford to buy food for their kids.

Worse, money that should have gone to education and health care, such as it exists, goes for food. The wonders of the invisible hand of starvation! Incredibly, while the people starved, Niger exported food according to capitalist market "logic". One is reminded of Czarist Russia, which exported wheat every year while the peasants went hungry.

Going the free market route was one of the dumbest things Niger ever did. It increased poverty, hunger and starvation. Yet the media tells us that this free market project is the only thing that works, and everything else is "failed". I think if the successful project were starving me, I might give one of those "failures" a shot.

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Death to the H-1B Program

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated July 7, 2008:

I am going to reprint the article below in its entirety, as I do not think a link should suffice.

90% of all computer jobs in the US are going to H-1B visa holders. To understand what an H-1B visa is, check out the essential Zazona website.

There is need for few, if any, H-1B jobs in the US.

We are allowing around 200,000-350,000 H-1B's into the US every year, mostly from India to work in computers, but also in many other fields, such as school psychologist, long-haul truck driver and just about every job you could possibly imagine. Some of the jobs that have been filled via guest worker programs are

• Accountants
• Administrators
• Executives
• Managers
• Administrators
• Software Programmers
• Computer Scientists
• Any type of Engineer and Technician you could imagine
• Research Associates
• Scientists
• Lawyers
• Tax Analysts
• Teachers
• College Professors
• Postdocs
• Fellows
• Sports Instructors
• Physiologists
• Doctors
• Nurses
• Med-Techs
• Therapists
• Pharmacists
• Surgical and Dental Assistants
• Fashion Models
• Secretaries
• Clerks
• Architects
• Musicians
• Artists
• Youth Counselors
• Day Care Workers
• Cashiers

Ridiculous!

This whole program and all of its various evil twins are about cheap labor and nothing else. There is no shortage of workers in any capacity in America.

Since 1990, the laws of economics have been overturned in the US. This coincides with the introduction of the H-1B program and its babies. Formerly, businesses hired when business was good and laid off when business was bad. In economics, that is called "normal".

H-1B turned that upside down and introduced something called "churning". This is where profitable businesses both massively fire and massively hire workers with no relationship at all to their profits.

This is what happens:

Suppose business at company A is going like gangbusters. Paradoxically, the company is laying off huge numbers of workers. At the same time, they are hiring huge numbers of workers to replace them.

What's the catch? All of the fired workers are Americans. All of the hired workers are H-1B's, mostly from India. This is churning, and it has been going on the US for 17 years now. Both parties support the H-1B madness to the absolute hilt!

Need to import agricultural and blue collar workers? Just get an H-2B or H-2A visa for them.

Need to import workers for your educational or government enterprise? Just get a J-1 visa for them.

Feel like importing Canadians or Mexicans for anything whatsoever? No problem, just get a TN (NAFTA) visa for them.

People wonder why those of us on the Left hated NAFTA and have opposed all of its attempted children. This is one excellent reason.
The fact that NAFTA caused a lowering of wages and a loss of jobs in the US, Canada and Mexico is yet another. It harmed workers and consumers in all three countries. The only people making out like bandits were businesses, in particular large businesses.

The Indian H-1B's are all brought here on visas that are stipulated as "non-immigrant visas". If they are not immigrants, what are they then? They are "guest workers", that's what they are!

The H-1B visa program quota fills up rapidly every year, leaving the US computer corporation liars screaming in paroxysms at Congress to raise the quota due to the "desperate job shortage". But there is no desperate worker shortage in that field. There are more than enough Americans to fill every single one of these jobs. No one calls the liars on it. Not one newspaper or magazine, not one politician.

In the past 6 years, an incredible 2 million of America's finest, our best and brightest, with years of education under their belts and the debts to show for it, have been tossed out on the streets like so much trash, replaced by inferior scabs from India.

I have heard stories like the one below before. Typically, the way H-1B works in a US computer corporation is this:

At first a few Indians are brought in. American workers are made, in abject humiliation, to train their replacements. This is akin to forcing a man to help his executioners prepare themselves for his own execution.

The opinion of most US tech workers is that these Indian tech workers are not very good. Most of them have been through a sleazy, corrupt 6-month program to get some "Masters of Computer Sciences Degree". A 6-month degree, with no prerequisite, that costs a whole $40! A 3-week training course in India is dishonestly written up as 4 years of experience.

The Indian H-1B's can't cut it, so the Americans have to make up for them. Or the Indians start to wreck the shop with their incompetence, but the management could care less.

The Indian H-1B's are almost all liars. They are some of the most dishonest people in this country. Show me an Indian H-1B, and I will show you a shameless, continuous, venal liar. Management knows they are lying all the time, but does not care.

Indian H-1B's tell the US government and their employer that they have a Master's Degree in Computer Science and that they 4 years of experience. The government and the employer both know the H-1B is lying; it's only a 6-month degree and he only had 3 weeks of experience, but neither cares.

An INS investigation of H-1B's revealed outrageous levels of fraud - 47% of H-1B's had faked credentials, experience or other essential facts. Most of the body shops are actually breaking the law via tax scams. This is one more way that American businesses cannot compete. Further, the body shops file the visa for one job and then reselling the employee as contractors.

After a while, the management, for some reason, fires the American supervisor. An Indian supervisor is now brought in the supervise the American-Indian mixed workforce. The Indian supervisor, either acting on management's order or through sheer ethnic chauvinism, begins to slowly fire all of the American workers.

He replaces them all with his Indian compatriots. Before they are terminated, each American is asked to train his Indian replacement. Most American workers training their replacements are shocked at how unqualified the Indian is for the job.

Whatever the motivations for this game, it smells like Indian ethnic warfare waged against non-Indian Americans through and through.

Indian H-1B's, unlike most scabs, have a large public relations industry in back of them, flush with cash. This industry gets charged up every year, along with the computer corporation liars, to squawk about the hallucinatory worker shortage.

Further, the Indian H-1B's themselves, being fairly intelligent, are known to pitch their case on the Net. Typically, the Indian liars say that any American who lost his job to an Indian scab is a "loser" who "could not cut it" and got fired to be replaced by his superior Indian replacement. He is urged to go out and hit the pavement in search of another job, no matter that 90% of them are reserved for foreign scabs.

The Indians below do not represent all Indians. The Indian H-1B scabs coming here are almost all Hindus from the upper castes. As such, they are the shock troops of the fascist Hindutva movement, since this movement appeals disproportionately to the upper castes.

These Indians either are part of the venal and wicked Indian ruling class, or they ally themselves with these parasites. At any rate, they see themselves as part of a racial and ethnic ruling class of India.

The Hindutva movement, like all ultranationalist rightwing movements, hates Western colonialism of their land. All India's problems are blamed on India's colonization by the British. In particular, Hinduism and especially the despicable caste system are upheld as the highest achievements of humanity¹.

The movement is characterized by extreme hatred of Muslims and especially Muslim rule in India, which admittedly was not a picnic. The Hindutvas demand that Muslims apologize for the terror of their rule in India, but being Muslims, they never will, because Muslims never apologize for anything.

But the Hindutvas, like all ultranationalist fools, will never apologize for anything either. The hatred of the British, as you see below, extends to hatred of "the White man", as these types refer to us.

When the British came to India, they were appalled at the sickening and backwards aspects of its "ancient and glorious" religion and culture.

They banned burning women on funeral pyres after their husbands' death. They hated caste and campaigned against it. They pointed out the idiocy and backwardness of scientifically illiterate Indian "science", demanded its removal from all Indian school texts, and ordered that it be replaced by fact-based Western science.

They did impose English-language education, but that was more to kill the power of backwards Hindu religion infiltrating via language.

To the Dalits, the horribly persecuted dark-skinned "nigger" untouchables of South India, the British were a Godsend. To the Hindutvas, they were the worst thing that ever happened.

As you can see, and despite their colonial exploitation of India, the British did try to civilize the Indians. For this the Hindutvas will forever hate them.

The Hindutva scabs that currently infest out guest worker program are usually shockingly racist (by US White standard) towards our African Americans. About this, the US Left is utterly silent, because the only racism they care about is White racism. The Hindutvas have had lots of practice hating Blacks, with the centuries of ultra-Jim Crow the higher castes have been dealing out to their own Dalit "Blacks".*

Sure, the Hindutvas call themselves Aryans. They even allied with Hitler during World War 2. In the 1930's, the Nazis sent some of their fool racial scientists to India to research the early "Aryan" race. Except that Nazi Aryanism meant "German". According to Nazi morons, Germanics were the original White people.

In truth, Whites probably came out of an 11,000 foot pass in the Pamir Mountains, Baroghil Pass, on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, some 35,000 years ago, although this is highly controversial. One group went west to become the Caucasoids or Whites, another north and east to become the Mongoloids, or East Asians.

An earlier post of mine, Osama bin Laden on Top of the World, goes into tremendous detail about this region and has lots of breathtaking photos.

Baroghil Pass on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border - birthplace of the White Race? DNA studies suggest that a group left here 35,000 years ago. One group went east and became the Mongoloids or East Asians. Another went west to become the Caucasians or Whites.

To this day, there are many blond, blue-eyed natives in this area whose presence is pretty much unexplained. One group is called the Kalash. These pagans are said to be related to Alexander the Great's army, but others say that connection is fanciful. They may go back much further than that.

A clearly 100% Caucasian Kalash woman from Pakistan, south of Chitral. Leftovers from Alexander the Great's army, or remnants of the first Whites from antiquity?


Poppies growing in Argo, Badakhshan Province, in Afghanistan. Badakhshan Province is in the far northeast of Afghanistan. Baroghil Pass is to the east, on the southern border of the Wakhan Corridor on the border with Chitral Province in Pakistan. The post about bin Laden linked above has a lot of information about both Badakhshan and the profoundly isolated Wakhan Corridor.


One model of the origin of the East Asians and Whites shows both of them coming out the Middle East. I favor an alternate model that has them coming out of northern Pakistan. I also wonder what evidence there is for proto-Amerindians crossing the Pacific Ocean to come to America 13,000 years ago?

The origin of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family, the true Aryans, lies with the Tajiks of Tajikistan. See my earlier blog post on the Tajiks for more on them.

The hatred of "Whitey" seen in many Indians comes from ruling class, upper caste and ultra-racist Hindutva scum. So, most Indians don't really hate Whites at all, and Dalits may even love Whites - many Dalits loved the British. It's more of an Indian ruling class hatred for the colonizer who shamed them and tried to take away their stupid, evil and insanely racist caste customs.

I do not think there is any way under democracy to uproot India's wicked caste system since it is so deeply entrenched. The only way is a complete revolution, possibly a Maoist one. As Indian capitalism kills at least 4 million Indians every year, I figure any system that kills a lot less than that is pretty much worth it.

For this reason, I support India's Maoist revolutionaries, fanatics though they are. Killing 4 million people a year is already extreme. Perhaps that necessitates an extreme response.

Single Spark is an excellent website that includes some great resources on the Indian Maoists, including their interesting monthly magazine, People's March. They also have a very interesting ongoing "Stalin Project", which seems to be a step in the right direction in evaluating the man.

The article below, written by Simon Jones, originally appeared on the NewsBlaze website. The article:


After responding recently to articles about the Indian invasion of America, I was finally encouraged to write an article about my experiences in the high-tech industry. Because of severance agreements, the names of my former company and former coworkers have been changed or omitted.

I am a computer programmer, and have been for 15 years. I worked for a company in California for 6 years, and I was the director of one of the R&D projects.

About a year ago, most of the other American employees and I were fired and replaced with people from India on H-1B and L-1 visas. The people from India were making only a fraction of what we Americans were making. I was making $110K a year; my replacement, $37K. The people under me were making about $75K; their replacements, about $29K.

To keep my severance pay, I was required to stay on for an additional six months (after the other Americans were fired) to train the replacements. This was probably the most humiliating experience of my life.

What I describe above is happening now every day.

Many of my friends in high-tech have also recently been fired, and are being replaced with cheap imported labor from India or China. Microsoft says there is a “high-tech shortage,” which is a lie. Almost every American programmer I know is now unemployed and has been replaced by a cheap import. There is not a “shortage.” Big business only wants more cheap labor.

But the story only gets better...

You would think that the Indians would be appreciative of being allowed to work in the United States, but this was very far from the case. Most of their conversations involved extreme hatred of America, Americans, and anyone of European descent.

Here are some examples of their daily conversations:

- Indians are the real “Aryans.” The Human Genome Project shows that Indians are closely related to Africans. Thus Indians and Africans are the real “Aryans.”

- All people of European descent (i.e. all whites) must be exterminated.

- Blond hair and blue eyes are inferior traits. By the year 2090, all people with blond hair and blue eyes will either be bred or executed out of existence.

- One day India will invade and take over. It is India’s destiny to rule over Whites.

- Christianity is a disease that can only be cured with a bullet.

- Although most of the Indians were Hindu, a few were Muslim, and they were quite openly fond of Bin Laden.

The Hindus, however, seemed to hate white Americans just as much as if not more than the Muslims. On this they could agree.

And then there is the story about Praveen.

Praveen, a Hindu from Northern India, was often very “touchy” with me and the other Americans. He was always shaking our hands and patting us on the backs. I noticed too that after touching me he often left “red marks” on my clothes, and on others’ clothes.

There was also a break room that only a few Americans frequented. (Indians never visited it.) And Praveen was always in there tampering with the coffee machine.

After seeing him one day pricking himself with a safety pin to make himself bleed, it all came together. He was trying to transmit his blood to others - either by direct contact or by putting it in the coffee machine.

I heard that he was HIV+ and was trying to transmit it to the Americans.

Praveen went back to India shortly after that, so no criminal action was able to be taken. But a few of the other Indians did transmit HIV to a couple of the American women - and seemed very proud of it.

Management of the company was informed of this, but they did very little to look into it. When I told our CEO that I suspected that the Indians were spreading HIV around the workers, he called me a “racist” and told me to be quiet.

I’m sure he was aware of what was going on - but simply did not care. Cheap labor is cheap labor, that that is the bottom line for big business.

The only loyalty of big business is profit, and they could care less about American workers, American values, or the well-being of the United States.

And what about the future of America?

Are we going to auction off every American job to low-paid imports until there are no good American jobs left? Are we going to let third-world hordes take over our high-tech sector until not a single American is left in any important position?

The only effective and patriotic way to stop this is by massive deportations of all the cheap labor from India and China. Otherwise, with the help of big business, we are well on our way to becoming a third-world country.


*My condemnation of Hindutva Indian ultra-racists is not coming from a White nationalist POV. Instead, it is coming from an anti-racist universalist POV that condemns all ethnic chauvinism and racism, including Black, Hispanic, Indian and Arab racism, to name a few.

It is no accident that the strongest allies of Hindutva are the quasi-fascist neoconservatives in the US and the Judeo-fascist criminals currently decamping in Palestine. Their discourse and abusive, obnoxious, belligerent and bullying mentality is much the same as Jewish radical nationalist Zionists.

Notes

1.The relationship of Hindutva to caste is very complex. Some of the movement's leaders were against the persecution of the Dalits, but in India today, almost all upper caste Indians are strong supporters of, or at least apologists for, the caste system (my observation).

My personal experience with Indians in India who are even slightly sympathetic to Hindutva shows that almost all of them support caste-ism in one way or another.

Typically, they either deny that there is a caste problem in India (all the castes get on just fine), deny anti-Dalit violence, claim that the real problem is reverse discrimination by Dalits, claim that caste is not really a bad thing at all and in fact is what has made India great, claim that the Dalits are happy in their lot (cf: US Southerners notion that the slaves were happy in the fields), etc.

It goes without saying that the Indians in the story above are Hindutvas (note their Indian supremacism, their hatred of Whites and Christianity, etc.).

The experience of Americans working with Hindu immigrants is that almost all of them are from upper castes or the Indian middle and upper classes. Our experience has been that a huge number of these Indians are strong supporters of caste-ism, in fact, they have committed the serious crime of infecting America with their sickening system.

Our observation is that these same Indians in the US almost all hate US Blacks and at the same time hate the Dalits of India, whatever concessions Hindutva theory makes to anti-caste-ism. In India today, the upper castes who engage in massive anti-Dalit violence are often supporters of rightwing Hindutva movements.

Those wanting to allow more and more Indian Hindus to immigrate to the US need to consider how many of them are bringing their sickening and wicked caste ideology to our land.

I suggest a screening process for Indian immigrants to see to what extent they believe in caste. Those who show strong support for it should be banned from the US. Further, support for caste-ism could be a reason to deport Indian immigrants from the US. The US doesn't need caste!

For more on the highly complex, and, as is typical for fascists, extremely dishonest Hindutva discourse on caste, see here, here and here. This article in particular is insightful.

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1825: When the US South Was Not Yet White

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated January 23, 2008. The piece has undergone substantial revision. The title now reads, 1825: When the US South Was Not Yet White. The data referred to spoke of the US South in 1825, not the entire US. I apologize to anyone who got confused by my error.

Most people take it as a given that the USA as a nation and society is and always has been basically White, even mostly British or Northern European White. We have only to look at the authors of the Constitution and signers of the Declaration of Independence to see that all of them where White. And as the Christian fundamentalists love to remind us, they were all "Christians" too. Too bad most of them were actually Deists.

It's true since 1830 or so (see 1830 census figures Excel, pdf ), this has been a majority-White land, and that is the picture most people's memory and cultural knowledge of this country gives them.

But Whites have only been here a short while, and we were immigrants, or actually invaders at first, ourselves. Previously, this land was inhabited 100% by Amerindians, a race close to Northeast Asians. Before this was even a nation, huge numbers of Black slaves were imported to this land, such that most Black lineages in the US go back farther than most White lineages.

In California and the Southwest, we have even had Hispanics (almost all Mexicans) living here before those states were even a part of the US. A Filipino was part of the party that founded Los Angeles before California was even a state. He got sick in Baja and ended up staying there, but he was still present on the voyage. See below where many more Filipinos were already in this country even before 1781.

On the eve of the Gold Rush, there were a mere 1,000 Chinese in the US. Only seven of them were in California. But within a year of becoming a state, California was full of East Indians (Hindoos), Samoans/Hawaiians, Mexicans and other Pacific Islanders (Kanakas) and Chinese, all come for the Gold Rush.

By 1852, there were 25,000 Chinese alone in California. All of these groups stayed on through the whole decades-long Gold Rush and afterwards remained here as residents in the US.

So are West Africans, as this is where many of the American slaves came from. There was a Filipino settlement in St. Malo, Louisiana, in 1763, before the US was even formed. The first Chinese immigrants came to the US in 1820, but before the Gold Rush, only 1,000 or so had arrived.

Japanese and Filipinos have been present in Hawaii in large numbers since 1890, and Koreans have been present in much smaller numbers there from 1896. Hawaii was only made into a state in 1959. Cubans have also been here a very long time. Hundreds of Cubans came to St. Augustine, Florida in 1565, over 200 years before there was a USA.

Similarly, the first Jamaicans (a party of 20) in America were already in Jamestown, the first White British colony in the US, by 1619. Further, many Jamaicans were included in slave shipments to the US since Jamaica was a way station along the way between Africa and the US.

Significant numbers - two large ships full of Chilean and Peruvian miners were in California for the Gold Rush as early as 1848. A couple of thousand Brazilian and Caribbean Blacks also came for the Gold Rush. Note that California did not become a state until 1850.

Pakistanis (people from what later became Pakistan) were in the US since the 1700's and continuing into the 1800's in Oregon and Washington, working in agriculture, logging and mining in California. The first known East Indian Hindu came to the US in 1790, soon after the Declaration of Independence, as a maritime worker.

Mexicans, Samoans, Blacks, Cubans, East Indians, Pakistanis, Chileans, Peruvians, Filipinos, American Indians, Canadians, Japanese, West Africans, Hawaiians, Japanese, Koreans and Chinese have been here in significant, not trivial, numbers, from the very start.

They are not, as groups, wholly immigrants or foreigners to this land. They are not foreign to American culture - they are part of the very building blocks of it. Perhaps Germany, Russia, Sweden, France and most of Europe can lay claim to being predominantly White countries for centuries or millenia, but the US cannot.

On the inside back cover of a recent issue of American Heritage Magazine was a painting of the Antediluvian American South with some text below. The text took me aback. I shook my head and read it again and again and it's stuck in my head ever since.

It said that in 1825, the US South¹ was estimated to be 37% Black (almost all slaves), 25% American Indian², and only 38% was White³. Neither the Blacks nor the Indians could vote and none were citizens until the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, but so what.

Both the US South, and the nation as a whole, were already White-minority as early as 35 years after signing of the Constitution. Take that, "White America" fools!

The White America of movies, TV, magazines, books and memories was just a temporary mirage, a ship passing in the night.

Now, as the USA moves back to becoming a White-minority land, we are not changing the basic nature, culture and essence of this nation. We just reverting to our roots.

I am not arguing for unlimited immigration to this land (In fact, I want to seriously limit it) and I am a staunch opponent of illegal immigration. Nevertheless, it angers me when White Nationalists act like this is some kind of a "White country".

Nothing could be further from the truth.

¹I misremembered the text in the issue - it referred to the US South only, not the US as a whole. A look at the US Census Bureau information (Excel file here, pdf here) clears up the mystery. A 37% Black figure is apparent for Blacks in the US South.

The 25% Indian figure quoted was obviously for Amerindians in the South. Therefore, the article claimed that Whites were 38%, Blacks 37%, and Indians 25% in the US South in 1825.

Figures for the whole of the US reveal a White majority, however, if we include the Amerindians living in the Louisiana Purchase at that time (recently part of the US in 1825), we can still make a case for a non-White majority in the US. See note 3 below for more on that.

²There were numerically small numbers of Filipinos, Chinese, Mexicans, pre-Pakistanis (people from the land that would later become Pakistan), East Indians and Cubans here in 1825, but they probably added up to less than 1% of the population.

³The American Heritage figures quoted have now been called into question (see comments at the end of this post and the comments at the end of the frankly White racist American Renaissance article that linked this piece); the suggestion is that Blacks made up 19% of the US at the time, and Whites made up the rest.

The mystery is cleared up in note 1, where the magazine text referred to only the US South, not the US as a whole.

Indians were not counted in either the 1820 or 1830 censuses, and may have numbered 8 million in the US at the time (recall that the Louisiana Purchase had just been added to the nation).

Figure 12 million Indians in the US and Canada pre-contact, with 90% of those in the US (compare US and Canadian populations now for a 9-1 disparity in US versus Canadian population - a similar distribution was probably extant pre-contact). Assume 2 million Indians gone from the original population by 1825, mostly East of the Mississippi, and 2 million living in New Spain and the Oregon Territory.

This leaves us with 7 million Indians in the US in 1825. Further, runaway slaves were clearly not counted, probably 10% of the Black population. Figuring 7 million Indians, 9.2 million Whites and 2.5 million Blacks in 1825 still leaves us with a bare minority-White population in the US. The US was probably non-White majority from 1803-1825. By 1830, Whites were the majority entire nation, and have remained so ever since.

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Over 400 Yezidis Killed by Al Qaeda in Iraq

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated January 23, 2008. The official report is now at 354, not 400, with 80 people still missing. There are 600, not 400, wounded, and many are not expected to make it. 10 more bodies were found on Sunday, August 19.

Genocidal Al Qaeda Sunni Muslim Nazis continued to attack non-Sunni Muslims in Iraq, this time driving four vehicle bombs at two Yezidi villages, Qataniya and Adnaniya, in Iraq near Sinjar, near the border with Syria. The attack occurred on Tuesday, August 13.

They drove four vehicles towards the two villages at once, aiming them at the residential compounds where many Yezidis were milling about outside in the cooling evening air. Some reports say the villages are near Mosul, but actually they are right next to the Syrian border.

Large areas of these villages lie in ruins and the scene resembles a nuclear bomb blast. 334 were confirmed dead as of Friday afternoon, August 17. Other reports on the same day said the toll had gone over 400. Another 400 were wounded and another 70 or so are feared buried in the rubble. All of the homes in both villages, 150 homes, were leveled.

Many of the wounded are missing hands and legs. Many of the wounded are critically hurt and have been dying in the hospital. It surpassed the previous high death toll for an attack of over 200 for an mortar and multiple car bomb attack in Sadr City in November 2006.

The Islamic State of Iraq was seen handing out flyers near the towns in the past week telling Arabs to stay away from the villagers because the Yazidis were anti-Islam.

There is little Iraqi government presence in the region near the Syrian border and Iraq is not able to control the border. Recently, dozens of local Iraqi security forces resigned after receiving threats from guerrillas. There is an excellent BBC video analysis of the attack on this page.

I do not agree with the US imperialist talking head in the video, Anthony Cordesman, who implies in the video that the US "surge" is working and that Al Qaeda is being driven to the far corners of Iraq and is desperately seeking to ignite divides between all of Iraq's ethnic and religious groups in order to set off a civil war.

There is already a civil war in Iraq. This blast shows that the surge is hardly working and that Iraq is a clusterfuck to nowhere. Worse, it's genocide in slow motion.

Juan Cole suggests that this attack shows that Sunni Arabs are fighting with the Yazidis over territory. Cole also carries an excellent comment from "Ivorybill" that shows the attack may indeed have been an intergroup battle over territory.

The Yazidis supported the Kurdish rebellion in the 1970's and subsequently Saddam's Arab Nazis (Arab nationalists) destroyed the villages, rebuilt them and repopulated them with Arabs as part of Saddam's sickening fascist "Arabization" policy.

In 2003, the Arabs were moved out, typically at gunpoint, and they fled to Mosul. I think they could have been put up in housing nearby if the Arabs wanted to be reasonable about it. The Arabs are now concentrated in Ba'aj, a Bedouin town in the desert, and relations between Arabs and Yazidis are very tense.

Interestingly, the Yazidis captured a videotape of Saddam meeting with Izzat Ad-Duri, his right-hand man, in 1998. Ad-Duri suggested "completely eliminating" the Yazidis in the Sinjar area, whatever that means. Saddam said no.

There is a possibility that the Baath Party (now led by Ad-Duri) may have been behind this attack along with Al Qaeda. In that case, we may blame Arab Nazis along with Muslim Nazis. Al Qaeda are a genocidal mixture of Arab Nazis and Muslim Nazis.

Along related lines, Yazidis report that all of the Yazidis in the area had been threatened for some time now by local Arabs because the Yazidis had planned to vote to annex their part of Iraq into the Kurdish Zone. The suggestion is that this is an attack to get them to flee so they won't vote to leave Iraq.

And pickup trucks from the surrounding Arab villages had recently been spotted scouting out the Yazidi towns that were attacked. This shows clearly that the local Arab villages were involved in this genocidal attack and probably enlisted Iraqi Al Qaeda to do it. Iraqi Al Qaeda now styles itself charmingly "the protector of the Sunnis", and the Arab-fascist dog "Marxist" Al-Kubaysi, discussed below, this sort of Nazi BS is just dandy.

But I agree with Eugene Robinson that this looks like something more - genocide. Like an ancient feud between two groups of people. And it's genocidal bigotry too - a Yazidi survivor notes that every time they go to Mosul or Tel Afar, the (Sunni) Arabs or the (Shia) Turkmen try to kill them.

Why? Because these Muslims feel that the Yazidi are "devil worshipers", that's why. For an article on this blog that effectively destroys that notion, see here . It's just Iraqi Al Qaeda taking their usual 1-100 revenge (a philosophy another tribal people called Jews are fond of) for the stoning of Dua Aswad Khalil.

A photo of Dua Khalil Aswad, a beautiful young Yazidi teenager. At age 17, Dua fell in love with a Muslim man, eloped with him, converted to Islam and married him. Her family was furious, but she was told that she would be forgiven if she went back home. She had been staying in a Muslim cleric's home.

When she went home she was accosted by 10,000 men in her village, then stripped and stoned to death by her own relatives. The death was captured on cell phones and can be seen on this blog here. More civilized Yazidis in the cities were appalled by her death and ashamed of the backwards tribal behavior of the Yazidis of the countryside. Al Qaeda, a radical feminist organization if there ever was one, was so outraged by this barbarism that they pledged to kill every Yazidi in Iraq.

Sure, Al Qaeda kills women all the time, Sunnis, Shia, Christians, Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen. Hell, they don't discriminate. But this was different. "Infidels" killed a Muslim and the evil Takfiris of Al Qaeda would not stand for that affront.

As if Al Qaeda does not murder Muslim women every day of the week in Iraq! After the stoning, Al Qaeda murdered 23 Yazidi men on a bus in Mosul. They distributed literature in mosques urging the killing of all Yazidis. They hate the Yezidis because they are infidels and because, even worse, they are suspected to be devil worshipers.

If Al Qaeda ever moves into any other nation in large force, they will do the same thing they are doing in Iraq - they will target the non-Muslim religious, Muslim Shia and Sufis and the secular for genocide.

We wiped fascism and Nazism off the face of Earth in WW2. We need to do the same to the Sunni Takfiris of Al Qaeda and their allied groups - wipe them out. I am sorry if that sentiment is not "progressive".

Online responses to the attacks varied. At the excellent MPACUK forum (derided as terror-supporting Al Qaeda-loving British Muslims by British Jewish Zionists) there was a civilized and heartwarming outpouring of sadness for the mass murders of the innocent, showing the Zionists to be the liars they always are.

The British London Times Online has a very nice story about the Yazidis, complete with a neat photo of Yazidi men in full religious garb. They also have one of the nicest looking news websites around (a redesign). There is another nice writeup on the MSNBC site. Incredibly, on this website heavily populated with supporters of Sunni Takfiri-Salafist jihadis, there were cheers for the genocidal attack on the Yazidis on the grounds that

1. They are devil-worshipers.
2. It's a legitimate revenge for the stoning death of Dua Aswad Khalil, the Yazidi woman who converted to Islam and then married her Muslim boyfriend.

1 Muslim = 400 Yazidis.

Dua Khalil Aswad at age 5, the "Muslim" whose death was worth 400 Yazidis is here. I am sure she would not approve of that calculation. I must admit that I just adore girls of about this age. Not really sexually, my fantasy chamber is full of mature females and I don't want or need room for much else. I just think they are the most beautiful and adorable human creatures on the planet. Of any race or culture, the 5 year old girl is the same. I love the way they play, laugh, run, tease and sing.

They are uninhibited, curious, and quite intelligent. I'd like to father a young girl myself some day if I could. At one, they are "cute" but very stupid. At 2, they are crying too much and too shy and afraid to show off their amazing intelligence of language. By 9 or so they are are more serious, the energy and non-stop joy level has declined.

This is, curiously, called maturity. The 5-year old girl is bold, curious and friendly, full of joy, happiness and incredible energy, yet still cautious enough to be reasonable. Life is to play, no? What else are we here for anyway? And ideally, is it not, if your work is play, as mine has been in the finest days of working life?

At one job I told my co-workers, "Coming here every day is like going on vacation." And of course it was. I didn't want to go home at night. What for? I wanted to come in on weekends. Why not? The spirit of the eternal 5 yr girl suffused my office, and the other workers, who, sensibly, all hated their jobs, resented it.

I love 5 year old girls. What real human could not? There is nothing sexual there, just the normal appreciation of a wonder of nature, like a waterfall or a wild animal in nature. Call me anything you want, quit reading my blog, report me to Google, or whatever you want. I will shout it to the sky with no shame.

Sure, that's fair.

This blog has posted two articles on the Yazidis, Do the Yezidis Worship the Devil? and The Yezidis, a Mysterious Kurdish Religious Sect. The first article is quite long and goes into exhaustive detail about the group. Here is another take on the Yazidis from a fundamentalist Christian POV, saying that they are the precursors to all of the Abrahamic religions - pre-Jews, that is. I find that a little dubious.

On the subject of Al Qaeda and the increasingly insane and evil "Iraqi resistance", this Maoist blog incredibly prints an interview with the repellent "Leftist" Abduljabbar al Kubaysi, leader of the Iraqi "resistance" and secretary-general of the Leftist Iraqi Patriotic Alliance (IPA). I always worried about this guy, but now he has proven to be a complete maniac.

First, according to him, 99% of the mass murders attributed to Al Qaeda are not done by them - apparently they are done by Iran, the CIA, the Mossad or all three. Right. Then he defends the few mass murders that are supposedly actually done by them as a good revenge against the Iraqi Shia, since they support the evil Iran and all that. The usual Arab nationalist (Arab Nazi) BS.

Kubaysi is a funny kind of "socialist" - I suspect he is a Strasserist or a "National" Socialist, like so many Arab nationalists. Or maybe he is a National Bolshevik (flag look familiar)? All progressives need to stay clear of this fascist cancer. Guys like Kubaysi show just how dangerous playing with nationalist matches can be. And shame on the Maoists at Naxal Revolution for praising this fascist rat.

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