Ground Zero Mosque Backfires

Obama mosque stand draws praise and fire

Defense of Muslims' right could put Dems on spot before elections

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August 15, 2010

BY JULIE PACE

PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. -- Weighing his words carefully on a fiery political issue, President Obama said Saturday that Muslims have the right to build a mosque near New York's Ground Zero, but he did not say whether he thinks it's a good idea.
Obama commented during a trip to Florida, expanding on a Friday night White House speech in which he said Muslims have the same right to freedom of religion as everyone else in America.
His statements thrust him squarely into a debate he had skirted for weeks and could put Democrats on the spot three months before midterm elections. Until Friday, the White House had said it did not want to get involved in local decision-making.
Following up on Obama's comments Saturday, White House spokesman Bill Burton said the president wasn't backing off in any way from the remarks he made Friday.
"What he said last night, and reaffirmed today, is that if a church, a synagogue or a Hindu temple can be built on a site, you simply cannot deny that right to those who want to build a mosque," Burton said.
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who was among those who met with Obama on Saturday, lauded his position. Crist is running for the U.S. Senate as an independent. "I think he's right -- I mean, you know we're a country that in my view stands for freedom of religion and respect for others," Crist said. "I know there are sensitivities, and I understand them. This is a place where you're supposed to be able to practice your religion without the government telling you you can't."
Others pounced on Obama's statements.
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Saturday the decision to build the mosque wasn't an issue of religious freedom, but a matter of respect. "The fact that someone has the right to do something doesn't necessarily make it the right thing to do," he said. "That is the essence of tolerance, peace and understanding."
Added Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.): "President Obama is wrong. It is insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of Ground Zero."
The mosque would be part of a $100 million Islamic community center two blocks from where nearly 3,000 people perished when hijacked jetliners slammed into the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001.
The proposed construction has sparked debate around the country that has included opposition from top Republicans including Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich as well as the Anti-Defamation League.
Obama's Friday comment was taken by some to mean that he strongly supports the building of an Islamic center near the site of the Sept. 11 attack, which he never said.
Speaking to a gathering at the White House on Friday evening to observe the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Obama said that he believes "Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country."
"That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances," he said. "This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable."
Asked Saturday about the issue, he said: "I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right that people have that dates back to our founding."
Obama said that "my intention was simply to let people know what I thought. Which was that in this country we treat everybody equally and in accordance with the law, regardless of race, regardless of religion." AP

Social Networking Hazards

Google chief: My fears for Generation Facebook

By Jerome Taylor

Wednesday, 18 August 2010

Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, has issued a stark warning over the amount of personal data people leave on the internet and suggested that many of them will be forced one day to change their names in order to escape their cyber past.

In a startling admission from a man whose company has made billions by perfecting the art of hoarding, storing and retrieving information on us, Mr Schmidt suggested that the enormous quantity of detail we leave online may not be such a good thing after all.
The man who – alongside Google's founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page – runs the world's largest search engine said that young people will need to go as far as changing their identities if they are to truly erase what they have left online.
"I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he told the Wall Street Journal. "I mean we really have to think about these things as a society."
For a man whose company is built on the ability to store information and retrieve it again in a faster and more efficient way than its rivals, Mr Schmidt's admission revealed a surprising concern among Google's leadership over the importance of data privacy.
But it has also provoked a wider debate on the sheer amount of information we give away about ourselves online and how most of that data is virtually un-erasable.
Perhaps more than any other company Google has helped created a world where we willingly deposit vast amounts of personal data into the public domain – information that might previously have taken months of investigative work by professionals to find.
Google has made billions from storing data on its customers' browsing habits so that it can use that data to target them with personalised adverts. It also runs the kind of websites that have pioneered the open sharing of information online. The Californian internet giant owns You Tube, the world's largest video sharing website; it handles billions of our emails through Gmail; and – if you live in a big city – chances are that a Google Street View car has photographed your front door. A series of recent acquisitions also suggests it is hoping to move into the social networking market, the area of the internet that most concerns privacy campaigners.
Thanks to the global popularity of social networking – an estimated 600 million people have personal online profiles – friends, prospective employers and enemies alike are able to access photographs, videos and blogs that we may have long forgotten with a few simple clicks of a mouse. Recently one columnist in The New York Times went so far as to describe our current world as an age defined by "the impossibility of erasing your posted past and moving on".
Many websites yesterday picked up on the apparent disconnect between Mr Schmidt's comments and his company's ethos.
Chris Williams, of the online tech news website The Register, said: "Recording everything and making it knowable by everyone all the time is Google's stated mission, and it is profiting handsomely from the fact that society doesn't understand the consequences."
Other blogs remarked that one previous instance when Mr Schmidt had admitted concerns over the amount of personal information stored online was in 2005 when Google blacklisted the online technology magazine Cnet for an entire year.
In an article discussing privacy concerns generated by Google's data mining capabilities, Cnet's reporters published Mr Schmidt's salary, named the neighbourhood where he lives, some of his hobbies and political donations. All the information had been gleaned from Google searches.
But while bloggers and web forums reacted with tangible scepticism to Mr Schmidt's comments, others welcomed his frankness.
"His comments are a little ironic but they are also timely," said Dylan Sharpe from Big Brother Watch, which has campaigned against Google collecting wifi data on web users while taking photographs with its Street View cars.
He added: "Google is a company that specialises in knowing where you are, what you are doing and who you are talking to. That's a scary prospect even though Google's users sign up to this sort of data collection willingly.
"But Mr Schmidt is completely right on how much information we are giving away online. Right now there are millions of young kids and teenagers who, when they apply for jobs in 10 years' time, will find that there is so much embarrassing stuff about them online that they cannot take down."
Those who wish to delete what they have put up online, meanwhile, may find it next to impossible to entirely erase their cyber past.
"What many people do not realise is that as soon as you put something up online you lose possession and control of that information immediately," said Rik Fergusson, a cyber security expert at Trend Micro. "Anyone can download, store and distribute that information, it's out of your hands."
Privacy campaigners say more needs to be done to stop young people in particular depositing information online that may come back to haunt them.
"I think we need to change people's mindsets through education rather than legislation but it's definitely something that we need to talk to our children about," said Mr Sharpe.
Mr Fergusson, meanwhile, believes web users will increasingly demand better levels of data privacy over the coming decade.
"What would be ideal is some sort of technology where you as an end user would be able to assign the right to use, copy or distribute information about yourself to people of your own choosing," he said. "That sort of technology is already used in encrypted emails. I'm sure people will soon start asking for some form of encrypted social networking and companies will respond to that demand."
In his own words...
* "The internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy we've ever had."
* "Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You've got Facebook photos! People will find it's very useful to have devices that remember what you want to do, because you forgot... But society isn't ready for questions that will be raised as a result of user-generated content."
* "When the internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world."
* "People are surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think that they're idiots."
Case study: 'Drunken pirate' lark destroyed teaching career
The tale of Stacy Snyder, the "drunken pirate", is a cautionary one for any young person hoping to embark on a promising career.
Ms Snyder, a trainee teacher, had passed all her exams and completed her training. Her academic record was unblemished. That is, until her final summer, when her teachers – out of the blue – deemed that the behaviour she had displayed in her personal life was unbecoming of a teacher.
Her crime? She had uploaded an image of herself, wearing a pirate costume and drinking from a plastic cup on to a social networking site with the caption: "drunken pirate."
A colleague at the school where she had been training had seen it and reported it, saying that it was unprofessional to potentially expose pupils to photographs of a teacher drinking alcohol.
As university officials told her that her dream career was now out of her reach, she offered to take the photo down, and argued that it was not even possible to see what was in the cup. After all, she told them, "is there anything wrong with someone of a legally permissable age drinking alcohol?"
But her pleas were ignored. Ms Snyder never got the certificate she needed to teach and an attempt to sue the university for it was unsuccessful.
Placing a photograph of herself in "an unprofessional state" was her downfall: the image had been catalogued by search engines and by the time she realised the danger, it was impossible to take down.
Kevin Rawlinson
Independent UK

TBH Hearing-not suicide.

Pornthip rules out suicide

By Neville Spykerman and Boo Su-Lyn

August 18, 2010

SHAH ALAM, Aug 18 — Thai pathologist Dr Pornthip Rojanasunand maintained today that she is sure Teoh Beng Hock’s death last year was not a result of suicide, but she declined to repeat her previous assertion that it was 80 per cent a homicide.
“I still maintain my findings on pre-fall injuries. I cannot confirm he was conscious during the fall.
‘I will not go into percentage. I am sure it is not suicide,” she told the Coroner’s Court here under questioning from Selangor government lawyer Malik Imtiaz Sarwar.
Dr Pornthip was testifying for the second time at the inquest into DAP political aide Teoh’s death. Teoh was said to have fallen from the 14th floor of Plaza Masalam here where the state headquarters of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) was once housed.
Before his body was found on a fifth floor landing he had been questioned overnight by the MACC.
Earlier today in court, Dr Pornthip testified that she disagreed with the findings of Dr Peter Vanezis, the British forensic pathologist brought in by MACC to observe a second post mortem on Teoh last year. Dr Pornthip also observed the second post mortem.
“I still believe he was unconscious because there is no significant pathology to show he was conscious (when he fell),” she said, adding there was no sign of bilateral wrist fractures, so “I cannot confirm he was fully conscious.”
She disagreed with Dr Vanezis that Teoh broke his fall with his feet because she said there were no fractures on both ankles and wrist.
Dr Pornthip also disagreed with Dr Vanezis’s finding that neck injuries were caused by impact of fall. She pointed out that the neck was a protected area.
She said she found hemorrhaging on the neck which was bigger than what would have been caused by a fall. She and her staff reviewed 30 other cases at her institute and they did not find similar injuries.
She concluded it was impossible that the wound was caused by the fall.
On the injury to Teoh’s spine, she reviewed six cases at her institute and found no contusion under the skin as was the case with Teoh.
As such, she concluded that it was a pre-fall injury which was more severe than a manual strangulation.
The wound, she said, was caused by a blunt object which could be something pressed against Teoh’s head or neck.
The injury to Teoh’s anal region was also caused by a blunt object, she said.
As the second post-mortem showed severe fracture to Teoh’s pelvis which could have caused Teoh’s anus to be torn, she concluded that his anal injuries were a result of the fall and not from any beating.
Testifying in April, Dr Vanezis, had said a mysterious bruise to the left of Teoh’s neck was likely caused upon impact on the rough ground and consistent with death from a high place when he took to the witness stand in April this year, reinforcing the findings of previous government pathologists who concluded that Teoh had jumped to his death.
But the British pathologist — famed for his role in Princess Diana’s inquest — did not rule out the possibility that Teoh could also have suffered pre-fall injuries.
Vanezis told the inquest a broad bruise on the left side of Teoh’s neck could have been caused by a chokehold, a move he demonstrated in court.
He added the move may have knocked out Teoh, or at the very least, disoriented the latter enough when he fell out a 14th floor window at Plaza Masalam onto the fifth floor rooftop on July 16 last year.
“Sometimes you cannot take an injury in isolation. I’m uncomfortable to call it a pre-fall injury with confidence…I can’t rule it out,” Vanezis responded under cross-examination from lawyer Gobind Singh Deo, representing Teoh’s family during the hearing in April.
MI

Tengku Razaleigh on Malaysian Politics

Malaysia's Uneasy Dance with the Web

Tuesday, 17 August 2010
Are authorities about to start to filter Internet journalism? On July 31, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, who is rapidly becoming the stormy petrel of Malaysian politics, made a tough, uncompromising speech to the annual Malaysian Student leaders Summit in Kuala Lumpur. The 72-year-old Razaleigh, an elder statesman of the United Malays National Organization, called for the abolition Malaysia's Internal Security Act, the Official Secrets Act, the Printing and Publication Act and the Universities and Colleges Act, which circumscribes the freedom of expression of students and professors and which, Razaleigh said, "has done immense harm in dumbing down our universities." It was a major speech on an important occasion to Malaysia's future leaders. Other speakers included members of the judiciary, presidents of bar councils and many others. (It can be found here in its entirety) "Billions have been looted from this country, and Billions more are being siphoned out as our entire political structure crumbles. Yet we are gathered here in comfort, in a country that still seems to 'work': Most of the time," Razaleigh said. "This is due less to good management than to the extraordinary wealth of this country. You were born into a country of immense resources, both natural, cultural and social. We have been wearing down this advantage with mismanagement and corruption. With lies, tall tales and theft. We have a political class unwilling or unable to address the central issue of the day because they have grown fat and comfortable with a system built on lies and theft." Razaleigh's speech, controversial as it was, was not mentioned anywhere in the nation's mainstream press, despite the fact that among other things, he said that "over the last 25 years, much of the immense wealth generated by our productive people and our vast resources has been looted." Despite the fact that no newspapers printed any of the speech, Rejal Arbi, the former editor of the Malay language Berita Harian who is now a columnist, thought it merited exposure. However, Mior Kamarulbaid, the editor of the paper, thought otherwise. He spiked Rejal's column. Berita Harian is owned by UMNO, which is increasingly unsettled by Razaleigh's calls to clean out the endemic corruption in the party. Likewise, The Star, which is owned by the Malaysian Chinese Association, the second-biggest component of the Barisan Nasional, the ruling national coalition, didn't carry Razaleigh's remarks, nor did the New Straits Times, which is also owned by UMNO. Nor was it carried on the party-owned television stations. However, it was carried widely on Internet news sites, including being streamed on the independent Malaysiakini television. It was carried verbatim on the Internet-based news portal Malaysian Insider, among other Internet sites. This has assumed increasing importance because of an Aug. 16 report in the independent Internet news site Malaysian Insider that the administration of Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak is evaluating the feasibility of putting an Internet filter in place to block so-called "undesirable websites." According to the report, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission commissioned the Malaysian arm of KPMG, the accounting and advisory firm, to carry out a "'Study on Positive and Safe Use of the Internet' in early August to evaluate, among others, "the implementation of Internet Filter at Internet Gateway level" and "the impact of the various methods to Malaysian Internet users and Malaysia economy.'" A year ago, the government backed away from a similar plan for a filter to block websites it considered undesirable. After the story became public, Najib denied there was any plan to police the Internet. Although the rationale cited for such a filter is usually to keep pornography away from the nation's youth, it can be used to block undesirable political comment as well. In Thailand today, for instance, at least 13,000 websites have been blocked by the government, ostensibly to block unfavorable comment about the country's monarchy. But in fact, it is being used extensively to block political comment as well. It isn't clear what the KPMG study will be used for by the government. But when Internet journalism was just getting started in the late stages of the reign of former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, the government took a decision not to place the same kinds of controls on websites that it maintains for the print media, which are onerous indeed. The Printing and Presses Act, passed in 1984, has been used repeatedly against such publications as The Rocket, the vehicle of the opposition Democratic Party, and others. Human Rights Watch reported from New York in July that "the government has effectively suspended indefinitely publication of Suara Keadilan, the paper of the opposition Parti Keadilan Rakyat" and severely circumscribed the circulation of Harakah, published by the opposition Parti Islam se-Malaysia, or PAS. As a result of the fact that political parties control the mainstream media, the Internet in Malaysia has come alive, not just with opposition blogs and comment about the government, but with some solid – and some not so solid – journalism. But backing away from total internet freedom today is a difficult thing for any government to do and would generate considerable embarrassment, if not public outrage. In Malaysia, the Internet is broadly regarded as having played a major role in 2008 national elections that cost the Barisan Nasional its two-thirds majority in the parliament for the first time in the 50-year history of the country and delivered several states into the hands of the opposition. More lately, the Internet has carried extensive and embarrassing reports by The Sarawak Report, a Sarawak-based NGO, of the astonishing international holdings of the chief minister, Abdul Taib Mahmud, in Canada, the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, which the NGO claims were built on the ravaging of Sarawak's vast natural resources, particularly timber. Not a word of Taib's holdings has been carried in Malaysia's press. "We must have freedom as guaranteed under our Constitution," Razaleigh told the student leaders. "Freedom to assemble, associate, speak, write, move. This is basic. Even on matters of race and even on religious matters we should be able to speak freely, and we shall educate each other." Asia Sentinel

Obama Flip Flop on Ground Zero Mosque

Op-Ed Contributor

The Muslims in the Middle

By WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

Published: August 16, 2010

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Luba Lukova

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S eloquent endorsement on Friday of a planned Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center, followed by his apparent retreat the next day, was just one of many paradoxes at the heart of the increasingly impassioned controversy.
We have seen the Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to ending “unjust and unfair discrimination,” seek to discriminate against American Muslims. We have seen Newt Gingrich depict the organization behind the center — the Cordoba Initiative, which is dedicated to “improving Muslim-West relations” and interfaith dialogue — as a “deliberately insulting” and triumphalist force attempting to built a monument to Muslim victory near the site of the twin towers.
Most laughably, we have seen politicians like Rick Lazio, a Republican candidate for New York governor, question whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the principal figure behind the project, might have links to “radical organizations.”
The problem with such claims goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan. They show a dangerously inadequate understanding of the many divisions, complexities and nuances within the Islamic world — a failure that hugely hampers Western efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism and to reconcile Americans with peaceful adherents of the world’s second-largest religion.
Most of us are perfectly capable of making distinctions within the Christian world. The fact that someone is a Boston Roman Catholic doesn’t mean he’s in league with Irish Republican Army bomb makers, just as not all Orthodox Christians have ties to Serbian war criminals or Southern Baptists to the murderers of abortion doctors.
Yet many of our leaders have a tendency to see the Islamic world as a single, terrifying monolith. Had the George W. Bush administration been more aware of the irreconcilable differences between the Salafist jihadists of Al Qaeda and the secular Baathists of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the United States might never have blundered into a disastrous war, and instead kept its focus on rebuilding post-Taliban Afghanistan while the hearts and minds of the Afghans were still open to persuasion.
Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative is one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation. His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra. But in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, he is an infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate; they no doubt regard him as a legitimate target for assassination.
For such moderate, pluralistic Sufi imams are the front line against the most violent forms of Islam. In the most radical parts of the Muslim world, Sufi leaders risk their lives for their tolerant beliefs, every bit as bravely as American troops on the ground in Baghdad and Kabul do. Sufism is the most pluralistic incarnation of Islam — accessible to the learned and the ignorant, the faithful and nonbelievers — and is thus a uniquely valuable bridge between East and West.
The great Sufi saints like the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi held that all existence and all religions were one, all manifestations of the same divine reality. What was important was not the empty ritual of the mosque, church, synagogue or temple, but the striving to understand that divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart: that we all can find paradise within us, if we know where to look. In some ways Sufism, with its emphasis on love rather than judgment, represents the New Testament of Islam.
While the West remains blind to the divisions and distinctions within Islam, the challenge posed by the Sufi vision of the faith is not lost on the extremists. This was shown most violently on July 2, when the Pakistani Taliban organized a double-suicide bombing of the Data Darbar, the largest Sufi shrine in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. The attack took place on a Thursday night, when the shrine was at its busiest; 42 people were killed and 175 were injured.

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William Dalrymple is the author, most recently, of “Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.”
New York Times