Journal

[link thanks to Benjamin Harvey]

Via Facebook:

“Turkish police outdid today in terms of violence and viciousness alongside a shocking media blackout by the docile remnants of the Turkish media. Their behaviour was up there with the worst I have seen; Mubarak’s thugs during the height of the Egyptian Revolution and Iran’s Bassij during the 2009 Iranian election protests. Won’t even discuss Greece – nothing I’ve seen in Athens could compare to what was on show today in Taksim as police pistoleros shot one teargas canister after another into the crowds, hitting several demonstrators on the head and allegedly killing this girl:”

Via Advancing Human Rights

The president of the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association, Fozan Al Harbi, https://twitter.com/fowzanm  was summoned today by Riyad’s Bureau of Investigation and Prosecution. Al Harbi was questioned, and will have to endure an official investigation on Saturday May 11th.

Fozan is one of Saudi’s preeminent human rights defenders, helping political prisoners and their families recognize their rights. Activists in Saudi Arabia believe that their government is targeting Fozan as a part of a campaign to systematically delegitimize his civil right’s association, which has become more active in recent months. Saudi authorities have arrested the majority of its members.

The Association was established in 2009 by eleven human rights activists, calling on Saudi authorities to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The organization’s former president, Suleiman Ibrahim Al Rashoudi has a long history of activism, and was arrested a couple of times, most recently in December 2012, only a few weeks after he was elected president of the Association. Al Roshoudi is now serving a fifteen year prison term in Saudi’s Jaber prison.

These are the people the Saudi government sends to luxury spas

The cushy and luxurious-sounding Riyadh center — which sounds suspiciously like a desert-centered Club Med — reportedly sprawls over an area equivalent to approximately 10 soccer fields. There, AFP reports, prisoners pass their days huddling with counselors and attending seminars on religious affairs aimed at convincing them of the evils of waging murderous jihad.
AFP writes that in between such sessions, prisoners may relax at the center’s Olympic-size, indoor swimming pool, go for a turn in one of its saunas, exercise in the gymnasium, or take in a leisurely showing of their favorite shows in the complex’s television hall.

How do millionaires like Michael Moore and Glenn Beck turn human misery and despair into piles of cash? By never letting a crisis go to waste. Before the blood is washed from the streets, they’re hard at work, spinning crushed bone into gold.

Want to get in on the action? Here’s an outline any aspiring misery vulture can use.

Introduction: Be polite - Make a perfunctory condemnation of the crime

First subtopic: Never let a crisis go to waste – The crime confirms the theories that you’ve been ranting about for years. That’s why you ‘understand’ it and the motives behind the attack. Tell your readers that you know what the criminals want. Make it clear that if they don’t listen to you, they’ll be sorry.

Second subtopic: Tu quoque or “I’m rubber, you’re glue” - Appeal to hypocrisy. Discredit the opponent by showing their failure to act consistently in accordance with their position. Present proof that victim and his tribe/country/religion are just as bad/misguided/wrong as the perpetrator. Make a short but succinct list of all of the crimes and misdemeanors committed by the victims & related citizens throughout history. Exaggerate their faults,

Third subtopic: Fertilize your ideological fever swamp - Imply that their anger and outrage are pathetic and misguided. The only way they will ever be able to save themselves is to heed your advice (and the advice of those who are politically affiliated with you). If no one is on your side, use sockpuppets. If you can’t even manage that, use this quote from Mahatma Ghandi “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.”

Final summary: Re-state the perfunctory condemnation of attack, followed by a summary of the faults of the victim(s) and all related to them. Follow it up with veiled or not so veiled threats of further crime if your advice goes unheeded.

Saudi luxury ‘rehab’ facility for terrorists

Via the Daily Mail:

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia sent a written warning about accused Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2012, long before pressure-cooker blasts killed three and injured hundreds, according to a senior Saudi government official with direct knowledge of the document.

The Saudi warning, the official told MailOnline, was separate from the multiple red flags raised by Russian intelligence in 2011, and was based on human intelligence developed independently in Yemen.

Citing security concerns, the Saudi government also denied an entry visa to the elder Tsarnaev brother in December 2011, when he hoped to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, the source said. Tsarnaev’s plans to visit Saudi Arabia have not been previously disclosed…

…The Saudi official speculated that Tsarnaev’s residence in the United States might have made it more difficult for him to gain entry into the kingdom.

‘U.S.-based Muslims who become radicalized and want to visit Mecca create an unusual problem,’ he said, compelling the Saudi government ‘to carefully examine applications.’

ههههههههههههه (LOL in Arabic) You have to give them points for Chutzpah. It’s classic ‘blame the victim’. And our government will let them get away with it. Because they’re our friends. Because we need their oil. Because someone wants a new jaguar.

It’s the same plot as 9/11. The Saudis claimed that bin Laden hated them, yet they were and still are the Jihad’s primary source of fighters and funds.

Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba – but the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, according to Hillary Clinton.

“More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups,” says a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state. Her memo urged US diplomats to redouble their efforts to stop Gulf money reaching extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,” she said.

The question is not what the Saudis say, it’s what they do. Are they still sending millions to Jihadis in Chechnya (and everywhere else around the world)?

The wealthy Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, men like bin Laden and Khattab, fanned out in the 1980s and 1990s to wage jihad along the fringes of the Islamic world—places like Afghanistan, Bosnia, and the North Caucasus.  They took their own money and the sadaqa donations of rich fellow Arabs to finance their cause.  The disease could not be quarantined, and the infection spreads to this day.

Most recently, Chechen jihadists have made the news for joining forces with Syrian rebels, and declaring upon arrival that “Jihad needs very many things. Firstly it needs money.”

Are they still sending their foreign fighters all over the globe to kill innocents? Are they rewarding the fighters who return?

Saudi Arabia is hoping to wean jailed Al-Qaeda militants off religious extremism with counselling, spa treatments and plenty of exercise at a luxury rehabilitation centre in Riyadh.

In between sessions with counsellors and talks on religion, prisoners will be able to relax in the centre’s facilities which include an Olympic-size indoor swimming pool, a sauna, a gym and a television hall.

The new complex is the work of the Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Centre for Counselling and Care, a body set up seven years ago to rehabilitate extremists jailed during a Saudi crackdown on the local branch of Al-Qaeda.

If they’re not in jail, will the Marathon bombers’ business and family associates be buying new homes and riding around in Mercedes by this time next year? Bet they will be..

The Saudis are trying to blame the victim (us) for crimes that, if they didn’t directly carry them out, they certainly enabled. Why does our government and our media put up with it? Are they idiots or are they motivated by other things?

How Brown Moses exposed Syrian arms trafficking from his front room

Eliot Higgins has no need for a flak jacket, nor does he carry himself with the bravado of a war reporter. As an unemployed finance and admin worker his expertise lies in compiling spreadsheets, not dodging bullets. He has never been near a war zone. But all that hasn’t stopped him from breaking some of the most important stories on the Syrian conflict in the last year.

His work on analysing Syrian weapons, which began as a hobby, is now frequently cited by human rights groups and has led to questions in parliament. Higgins’ latest discovery of a new batch of Croatian weapons in the hands of Syrian rebels appears to have blown the lid on a covert international operation to arm the opposition.

And he’s done it all, largely unpaid, from a laptop more than 3,000 miles away from Damascus, in his front room in a Leicester suburb…

…The conflict in Syria has been extremely difficult and dangerous for conventional media organisations to cover. But the slew of YouTube footage from citizen journalists has opened up a new way of monitoring what’s happening for those such as Higgins who are dedicated and meticulous enough to sift through it…

…The New York Times veteran war reporter CJ Chivers, author of The Gun: the story of the AK47, says fellow journalists should be more honest about the debt they owe to Higgins’ Brown Moses blog. “Many people, whether they admit or not, have been relying on that blog’s daily labour to cull the uncountable videos that circulate from the conflict,” he says.

Chivers acknowledged that Higgins was on to the Croatian arms story weeks before the New York Times. He and Higgins then worked together to develop the story, with Chivers rooting out extra details about how the weapons were financed.

According to Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, Brown Moses “represents an important development in arms monitoring, which used to be the domain of a few secretive specialists with access to the required and often classified reference materials.”

So Brown Moses isn’t black, or Jewish, and he’s not a war reporter. He’s not even an arms merchant. He seems to be one of those British ‘enthusiasts,’ like these Rail fans or Ian of Ian’s Shoelace Site. If this is where this kind of hobby leads, more power to them.

Hopefully he’ll start getting paid for this.

More: The Brown Moses Blog: More Videos Of Croatian Weapons With Non-FSA Islamists, Salafists, and Jihadists