Starting Points

Sep 17, 2009

Spain must end incommunicado detention | Amnesty International

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15 September 2009

Spain must end the practice of incommunicado detention as it violates the rights of people deprived of their liberty, said Amnesty International in a report published on Tuesday.

"It is inadmissible that in present day Spain anyone who is arrested for whatever reason should disappear as if in a black hole for days on end. Such lack of transparency can be used as a veil to hide human rights violations," said Nicola Duckworth, Europe and Central Asia Programme Director.

In its report, Out of the shadows: End incommunicado detention in Spain, Amnesty International illustrates how Spain has one of the strictest detention regimes in Europe which is in breach of the country's obligations under international human rights law.

Spain's law of criminal procedure allows for a detainee to be held incommunicado for up to five days in all cases and for up to 13 days if suspected of terrorism-related offences. The 13-day period consists of up to five days of incommunicado detention in police custody, which can be extended by a further five days incommunicado in preventive imprisonment. An additional three days of incommunicado detention may be imposed by a judge at any time during the investigation.

"While held incommunicado, detainees cannot talk to a lawyer or a doctor of their choice. Their families live in stress not knowing what has happened to them and many detainees held incommunicado report that they have been tortured or ill-treated, but such allegations are rarely investigated," Nicola Duckworth said.

"Incommunicado detention denies detainees the right to fair trial. Such detention in itself may constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. It does not comply with international human rights standards."

International organizations have repeatedly expressed concern about the risk of torture and other ill-treament during incommunicado detention. Such is the case of Mohamed Mrabet Fahsi who was arrested on terrorism-related charges on 10 January 2006 in his home near the city of Barcelona. During his detention incommunicado he was not able to call his own lawyer. Mohammed Fahsi told Amnesty International that he was tortured and ill-treated but both the doctor who examined him and the investigative judge ignored his complaints.

The Spanish government has justified the use of incommunicado detention on grounds of national security and public safety.

"Incommunicado detention must be relegated to the past. No other European Union country maintains a detention regime with such severe restrictions on the rights of detainees," Nicola Duckworth said.

Amnesty International has called on the Spanish authorities to:

Scrap legislation allowing incommunicado detention;
Allow all detainees to speak in confidence with a lawyer without police officers present;
Allow all detainees to have a lawyer of their choice who will be present during questioning;
Allow all detainees to be examined by a doctor of their choice;
Allow all detainees to have their families notified of their detention and location;
Make compulsory in all cases the video and audio recording at places where detainees may be present, except where this may violate their right to private consultations with their lawyer or doctor;
Investigate promptly, thoroughly and impartially all allegations of torture and other ill-treatment made by detainees.

Spain: Out of the shadows - Time to end incommunicado detention

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Index Number: EUR 41/001/2009
Date Published: 15 September 2009
Categories: Spain

Amnesty International considers that the incommunicado regime in Spanish law is a violation of Spain’s obligations under international human rights law. No other European Union country maintains a detention regime with such severe restrictions on the rights of detainees. The continuing allegations of torture and other ill-treatment demonstrate the grave consequences detention in this regime may have. Amnesty International calls on parliament to abrogate the existing legislation and to ensure the effective protection of the rights of all persons deprived of their liberty.

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Human rights activists under threat in Serbia | Amnesty International

Journalist Dinko Druhonic has been targeted for criticising neo-fascists

14 September 2009

Human rights defenders are under attack in Serbia and the authorities are failing to protect them, Amnesty International said on Monday.

Over the past year women human rights activists have faced repeated attacks in the Serbian media including being threatened with lynching.

Such attacks are made by parliamentarians, members of ultra-right organizations and members of the security services indicted for war crimes. Other defenders have had their property destroyed, their offices attacked or been beaten by members of neo-Nazi groups.

"Physical attacks and threats to the lives and property of human rights activists are seldom promptly and impartially investigated by the authorities and few perpetrators are brought to justice," said Sian Jones, Amnesty International’s Balkans expert.

"The lack of political will on the part of the authorities to fulfil their obligations to guarantee human rights defenders their right to freedom of expression and assembly creates a climate of impunity which stifles civil society."

In the briefing Serbia: Human rights defenders at risk Amnesty International reviews the latest attacks against human rights activists, including those against leading women human rights activists.

These defenders include Nataša Kandić, director of the Humanitarian Law Centre, Sonja Biserko of the Serbian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, and Biljana Kovačević-Vučo of the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights (YUCOM), as well as the women’s NGO Women in Black.

They have been portrayed in the media as anti-Serb for favouring the independence of Kosovo, and for demanding accountability for war crimes committed in the 1990s in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.

The briefing also focuses on those who defend the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people (LGBT). Since 2001 the LGBT community in Serbia has been unable to hold a Pride Day parade due to serious threats by right-wing and religious organizations. Such organizations have already made unveiled threats against the organizers of this year’s parade, scheduled for 20 September.

"The LGBT community is marginalized even within civil society and criminal investigations into assaults on LGBT people, even where the perpetrators have been identified, are rarely resolved," Sian Jones said.

"The Serbian authorities are obliged to protect the rights of all people to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression. They must condemn publicly all attacks on and threats to human rights activists, and provide protection and support during the forthcoming Belgrade Pride later this week."

Amnesty International calls on the Serbian government to implement in law and in practice the principles of the UN Declaration of Human Rights Defenders, which provides a framework for the protection and support of human rights defenders. The organization also calls on the embassies of EU member states to provide protection and support to defenders in Serbia.

Serbia: Human rights defenders at risk

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Index Number: EUR 70/014/2009
Date Published: 14 September 2009
Categories: Serbia

Human rights defenders (HRDs) In Serbia continue to be at risk from attack by both state and non-state actors, including the media. The Serbian authorities are failing to protect them from physical attacks and threats to their lives and property. Amnesty International is extremely concerned at the impact of these attacks on the rights of HRDs and the rights to freedom of expression and assembly in Serbia.

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A Terrorist Mastermind Whose Luck Ran Out - NYTimes.com

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By SETH MYDANS

BANGKOK — Over the past six years, Noordin Muhammad Top, considered to be the most violent Islamist militants in the region, had become an almost mythical figure among both those who sheltered him on the run and those who pursued him and finally killed him in Indonesia on Thursday.

While suspected of orchestrating the country’s main bombing attacks during those years, he repeatedly slipped away from capture, most recently in August when, after an all-night raid on a safe house, the police discovered they had killed the wrong man.

At a news conference on Thursday, the chief of the National Police, Bambang Hendarso Danuri, held up photographs of fingerprints that he said confirmed that this time, the man they had killed was Mr. Noordin.

Journalists joined the police in raising a cheer.

As the region’s main Islamist group, Jemaah Islamiyah, turned away from large-scale violence in recent years, and as its leading figures were killed or captured one after another, Mr. Noordin, 41, became the most wanted terrorism suspect and a symbol of violent jihad.

He made a name for himself as the most skilled, inventive and dangerous bomb maker in the country, and was suspected of planning bomb attacks on the JW Marriott hotel in Jakarta in 2003, on the Australian Embassy in Jakarta in 2004, in Bali in 2005 and at the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta in July.

People who knew him and people who have studied his activities said Thursday that Mr. Noordin had a quiet magnetism that drew sympathizers to protect him, new recruits to join his splinter group and at least three women to marry and start families with him, giving him both cover and shelter.

“He was a quiet person, didn’t talk much, very pious,” said an Islamic clergyman, Abu Wildan, who knew him between 1993 and 2002 when he was a student and then the headmaster at Lukmanul Hakiem, an Islamic boarding school in Malaysia, where he was born.

“He prayed five times a day and was keen to look after and defend the Muslims’ rights,” Mr. Wildan said in a telephone interview. Mr. Noordin, who graduated from the University of Technology in Malaysia in 1991, taught computers, sociology and the Malay language at the boarding school, he said.

Mr. Noordin was also a networker, Mr. Wildan said, visiting friends who were sick and consulting with fellow teachers before making decisions at the boarding school.

The school preached the violent brand of jihad of Abu Bakar Bashir, the godfather of Jemaah Islamiyah, and Mr. Noordin embraced its radical version of Islam.

Like many other militants, he fled to Indonesia to evade a Malaysian crackdown on militants that followed the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

By this time he seemed to have matured into a more focused and ambitious man, according to Nasir Abas, a former Islamist leader who defected to the government in 2003 and who was for a time Mr. Noordin’s commander.

“He is very well-organized,” Mr. Abas said in a telephone interview. “He is very charismatic. He is articulate, he is very good in influencing people to join his cause, giving encouragement and motivation.

“That’s why he was good in recruiting his followers.”

But it was luck and circumstance that turned him into a leader, said Sidney Jones, an expert on terrorism with the International Crisis Group.

He did not set out be become a bomb maker but began working with explosives when another militant, who had been hiding them, said he no longer wanted to keep them, Ms. Jones said, speaking by telephone from Jakarta.

“It was only when he was forced into a decision about having explosives that he became a leader and turned into a bomb maker,” she said.

“And from that time on his status grew within the radical fringe of the extremist network,” she said. “It continued to grow with each act and with his ability to elude the police. And so it was largely through flukes and an astonishing run of good luck, rather than skill on his part.”

After breaking with Jemaah Islamiyah, Mr. Noordin founded a splinter group that, Ms. Jones wrote recently, “models itself, in terms of ideology, targets, and propaganda, after Al Qaeda. The question is whether he only imitates it or whether he has some structural affiliation.”

Mr. Noordin also made contacts and recruited supporters in a wide network that included Indonesia, Malaysia and the southern Philippines, according to Rohan Gunaratna, the head of the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

“He could preach a very radical version of Islam but could present it in a very, very simple way to attract students whom he managed to convince,” Mr. Gunaratna said in an interview.

Mr. Noordin’s death is a major victory for security forces, he said, but it will not mean an end to violence. “He leaves behind a significant network that will continue the fight.”

Sari Sudarsono contributed reporting from Singapore.

Sep 16, 2009

Japan sees historic change, Hatoyama elected prime minister, forms DPJ-led Cabinet - Daily Yomiuri)

Democratic Party of Japan leader Yukio Hatoyama, standing, bows as he is applauded by fellow lawmakers after he was elected the nation's 60th prime minister at the House of Representatives plenary session Wednesday.

Democratic Party of Japan President Yukio Hatoyama was elected the nation's 60th prime minister in a special Diet session convened Wednesday. He officially announced the lineup of his Cabinet later in the day.

Hatoyama formed the nation's 93rd cabinet, which was then sworn in at an attestation ceremony at the Imperial Palace, launching the DPJ-led government in coalition with the Social Democratic Party and the People's New Party.

It is the first time for the Liberal Democratic Party to hand over the reins of government in 16 years.

The 172nd Diet session was convened Wednesday, with the session to run through Saturday.

Hatoyama was named prime minister at the plenary session of the House of Representatives that started at 1 p.m. and then at the House of Councillors plenary session that started at 2:30 p.m.--in each case by a majority vote including votes by the SDP and PNP members.

Before Hatoyama was named prime minister at the lower house, the DPJ's Takahiro Yokomichi was elected the speaker of the lower house and former Defense Minister Seishiro Eto of the LDP was elected the vice speaker.

With regard to the Cabinet posts, DPJ Acting President Naoto Kan was named deputy prime minister and national strategy minister. Kan also will serve as the state minister in charge of economic and fiscal policy until the government abolishes the existing Council on Fiscal and Economic Policy.

Hatoyama appointed Hirofumi Hirano, chief of the DPJ executives secretariat, as chief cabinet secretary, and former party Secretary General Katsuya Okada as foreign minister.

DPJ Vice President Seiji Maehara was named construction and transport minister and will also serve as state minister for disaster management and Okinawa and the northern territories. Akira Nagatsuma, acting chairman of the DPJ Policy Research Committee, was appointed health, labor and welfare minister.

Other DPJ members who were given portfolios included the party's top adviser Hirohisa Fujii, who was named finance minister; party Vice President Tatsuo Kawabata who became education, science and technology minister; and Kazuhiro Haraguchi who was chosen as internal affairs and communications minister. Hatoyama appointed upper house member Keiko Chiba as justice minister. Policy Research Committee Chairman Masayuki Naoshima was given the post of economy, trade and industry minister, and Vice President Toshimi Kitazawa was named defense minister.

The posts of deputy chief cabinet secretaries for parliamentary affairs were given to Yorihisa Matsuno from the lower house, and Koji Matsui from the upper house.

From the DPJ's coalition partners, SDP leader Mizuho Fukushima entered the Cabinet as state minister in charge of consumer affairs and the declining birthrate. Fukushima's portfolio as state minister also covers gender equality and food safety issues.

Under a ruling coalition agreement, PNP leader Shizuka Kamei was named state minister in charge of financial services and postal reform.

Former Justice Minister Hiroshi Nakai was named chairman of the National Public Safety Commission and state minister in charge of abduction issues.

Former Policy Research Committee Chairman Yoshito Sengoku was appointed state minister in charge of the newly established administrative renewal council.

===

Aso Cabinet resigns

The Cabinet of Prime Minister Taro Aso resigned Wednesday, ending its administration about a year after it was formed in September last year.

At a press conference held after a special Cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister's Office, Aso said the new government should promote economic measures and making a contribution to the international community.

"The economic recovery is only halfway through. I hope [the new government] makes an effort to solidify the economic recovery. I greatly hope it will appropriately deal with terrorism, piracy" and other international issues, he said.

Looking back over his 358 days as prime minister, Aso said, "It was a short period of time, but I did my best for Japan."

"I was able to respond promptly to a global recession said to be the worst in a century. I think I can be proud of myself for implementing drastic economic measures, such as compiling four budgets," he said.

Referring to the Liberal Democratic Party's presidential election to be held Sept. 28, Aso said: "We should unite [the party]. Someone who can do the job based on an analysis of what the problem was for the LDP" is desirable as the new party leader.

--------

NEW CABINET (Sept. 16, 2009)

Prime Minister / Yukio Hatoyama, 62

Deputy Prime Minister and National Strategy Minister / Naoto Kan, 62

Internal Affairs and Communications Minister / Kazuhiro Haraguchi, 50

Justice Minister / Keiko Chiba, 61

Foreign Minister / Katsuya Okada, 56

Finance Minister / Hirohisa Fujii, 77

Education, Science and Technology Minister / Tatsuo Kawabata, 64

Health, Labor and Welfare Minister / Akira Nagatsuma, 49

Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister / Hirotaka Akamatsu, 61

Economy, Trade and Industry Minister / Masayuki Naoshima, 63

Construction and Transport Minister / Seiji Maehara, 47

Environment Minister / Sakihito Ozawa, 55

Defense Minister / Toshimi Kitazawa, 71

Chief Cabinet Secretary / Hirofumi Hirano, 60

National Public Safety Commission Chairman / Hiroshi Nakai, 67

State Minister in Charge of Financial Services and Postal Reform / Shizuka Kamei, 72*

State Minister in Charge of Consumer Affairs and Declining Birthrate / Mizuho Fukushima, 53**

Administrative Renewal Minister / Yoshito Sengoku, 63

(* People's New Party, ** Social Democratic Party)

(Sep. 16, 2009)

U.N. Deputy in Kabul Leaves in Dispute With Boss Over Flawed Vote - washingtonpost.com

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By Pamela Constable and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 16, 2009

KABUL, Sept. 15 -- The deputy head of the U.N. mission here has abruptly left the country after a dispute with the mission's Norwegian chief over whether to publicly denounce Afghanistan's election commission for not discounting clearly fraudulent votes cast in favor of President Hamid Karzai's reelection.

Mounting tensions over the country's tainted presidential vote have divided and frustrated Afghanistan's international backers, and endangered President Obama's troubled war strategy as his administration debates whether to deploy additional U.S. troops.

American diplomat Peter W. Galbraith and his Norwegian boss, U.N. Special Representative Kai Eide, disagreed so strongly over the right post-election approach that they were unable to keep working together, prompting Galbraith's departure from the country Sunday.

"I suggested to him, and he agreed, that it would be best" to leave the country, Galbraith said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "It's fair to say [Eide] didn't have confidence that I would follow his policy line on this, and I had disagreements with his policy line that were best resolved by leaving." A senior U.N. official here said Galbraith "will be back."

On Thursday, Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission is set to announce final results from the Aug. 20 vote. It is expected to declare that Karzai has won reelection with about 54 percent of the vote and that his top challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, has lost with about 28 percent.

But the polling process has been irreparably tainted. A separate, U.N.-sponsored Electoral Complaints Commission has found evidence of fraud at polls throughout the country, and the panel said Tuesday that about 10 percent of the entire vote, from 2,500 polling stations, needs to be recounted on suspicion of fraud. This might affect enough ballots to lower Karzai's tally below the 50 percent plus one vote he needs to avoid a runoff with Abdullah.

The question that has increasingly divided Afghan experts and international officials here is whether to pursue the time-consuming fraud investigations to the end -- leaving a weakened Karzai, estranged from Afghanistan's international backers, in power during months of political drift and potential violence until a possible spring runoff -- or to seek an unlikely political compromise among Afghans to avoid a second round of voting.

Divisions over what to do exist even within the Obama administration, which is under increasing pressure to demonstrate to a skeptical Congress and American public that its Afghanistan strategy is working. That strategy depends on having a viable, democratically elected partner in the Afghan government.

The divisions are paralleled in disagreements among NATO allies fighting in Afghanistan that began long before the presidential vote. Some European countries have lowered their troop commitments to Afghanistan, while the United States is increasing the size of its force. A recent U.S. airstrike in northern Afghanistan that killed at least 70 people -- including some civilians -- was requested by German ground forces that the Americans complain have not been active enough in patrolling the area.

In the post-election dispute, sources close to the United Nations said Galbraith represented the view that the fraud probe must be fully carried out, along with a partial recount that the complaints panel ordered, even if this leads to a delayed runoff. That view jibes with the vision of Grant Kippen, the Canadian who heads the complaints commission, that building a democratic process matters more than who wins this election.

Germany's foreign minister said Tuesday that his government would press for a full investigation of the fraud complaints, saying the new Afghan president needed to be "recognized and respected by the entire population." Other European governments have backed off from their initial praise for the election, saying that unless the new government is seen as legitimate, it will be hard for them to justify continued military involvement.

But another, more pragmatic school of thought, which Eide has publicly endorsed in the past, argues that a runoff may be too difficult and dangerous to hold. The urgent need to establish a new government while Afghanistan and its Western allies are fighting a war against Taliban insurgents, this line of thinking goes, requires finding a political solution such as a compromise between Karzai and Abdullah.

Diplomatic sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said U.S. officials here had been frustrated in their efforts to press Karzai to acknowledge the widespread fraud and to accept the possibility of a runoff, or to make a deal in which he would remain as a titular president but be held more accountable for his actions and allow himself to be surrounded by foreign, technocratic advisers.

The sources said Karzai has been privately trying to win over European diplomats, including Eide, suggesting that they not be overly concerned about the fraud problem and give him full support on the grounds that he has won a decisive mandate.

The dispute leading directly to Galbraith's departure began Sept. 2, when he called the Afghan election commission to protest its decision to abandon agreed-upon guidelines under which it would not count any ballots submitted by local officials from "ghost" polling places, where no voters showed up because of security concerns, sources said. The United Nations, Galbraith said, would not remain silent in the face of the decision.

Within 90 minutes, Karzai had summoned U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry to protest Galbraith's action; Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta summoned Galbraith to a meeting that afternoon. Eide, sources said, told his deputy he disagreed with his intervention and made his views known to the Afghan government.

On Sept. 7, the election commission decided to go ahead with the ghost tally, and it announced the next day that Karzai, with more than 90 percent of the vote counted, had passed the 50 percent mark.

DeYoung reported from Washington.

Sep 15, 2009

Muslim American Doctors Give Back to Their Communities

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Free health services answer Obama’s call to service

By Ahmed Mohamed
Staff Writer

Washington — “I see us as Americans. This is our home, not a home away from home. We chose to come here; we chose this country as our country. America is our country. We were given chances here for education, business; we were allowed to be who we are. Now it’s time for us to pay back the country that accepted us with open arms,” said Rodwan Saleh, president of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston, Texas, during a fundraising event for the Al-Shifa Clinic in Fort Worth, Texas.

Al-Shifa is but one example of a free Muslim clinic that serves the American community regardless of the ethnic or religious background of patients.

Muslim community-based health organizations have emerged steadily since before the turn of this century, a good example being the University Muslim Medical Association (UMMA), one of the oldest free Muslim health care clinics, which has served the Los Angeles community since 1996.

Other examples are the Al-Shifa Clinic in San Bernardino County in California (2000), the Ibn Sina Foundation Clinic in Houston (2001), the Inner-City Muslim Action Network Health Clinic in Chicago (2002), the Compassionate Care Network in Chicago (2004) and the Health Unit on Davison Avenue Clinic in Detroit (2004). Organizations like Zaman International in Detroit are slowly emerging, and are dedicated to providing humanitarian relief as well as end-of-life care and women’s shelters. Other Muslim-initiated community health programs are developing in Chicago; Baltimore; northern Virginia; Las Vegas; Buffalo, New York; and elsewhere, building on the models established by these pioneering organizations.

A recent report by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding outlined how Muslim community-based health organizations are providing a critical safety net in health care access for the most underserved communities in America.

Titled “Caring for Our Neighbors,” the study provides a picture of the motivations that drove Muslim-American health professionals to become involved in these clinics. The report also describes the demographic makeup of the populations they serve and the clinics’ growing role in American public health and community building.

Researchers found that while the clinics’ service models may vary, their services are universally available to everyone, regardless of their patients’ ethnic or religious background, at a low cost or even free of charge. The vast majority of their patients come from families living below the federal poverty level and who almost always lack health insurance.

According to the report’s findings, the clinics operate on lean budgets, relying heavily on donated equipment and volunteer physicians, many of whom are first-generation American Muslims who are driven by a desire to give back to the country that welcomed them as immigrants. The report also documents the emergence of a new American-born generation of Muslims dedicated to serving the only country they have ever known.

“What we found is that these clinics are stepping in to meet a critical need in communities across America,” said Lance Laird, a fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. “That service model remains all the more important today as rising health care costs are leaving a growing number of families uninsured.”

Muslim-American doctors have become a part of the solution for the current health insurance crisis, as seen in four examples of health clinics across the nation.

UMMA Clinic, California. The University Muslim Medical Association (UMMA) provides a good example of these clinics. Located in the heart of south central Los Angeles, the clinic serves an impoverished but culturally rich population that is 73 percent Latino and 25 percent African Americans. It serves the homeless as well as the unemployed and working poor who do not receive insurance or qualify for state assistance, in one of the poorest and most medically underserved areas of the region.

“UMMA shall strive to pursue opportunities for interaction and understanding between Muslim Americans and people of all other cultural, economic and religious backgrounds,” said Awais Chughtai, community relations coordinator, “to promote the well-being of the underserved by providing access to high quality health care for all, regardless of ability to pay.”

Chughtai expressed the clinic founders’ vision: “The services, activities and governance of UMMA shall reflect the Islamic values and moral principles which inspired its founders. These include the core values which are universally shared and revered by society at large, such as service, compassion, dignity, social justice and ethical conduct.”

The UMMA clinic was launched to “exemplify the positive contributions of Muslims to American society and to serve as a model of institutional excellence for the American community, by upholding the highest standards in all aspects of its services, activities and governance, also to provide medical education and training to future health professionals,” Chughtai said.

Al-Shifa Clinic, Texas. The Al-Shifa Clinic is a weekly free clinic in Fort Worth. It operates under the umbrella of the Muslim Community Center for Human Services organization.

“It provides services for general medical problems such as diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol and minor infections. If these problems are not treated at an early stage, they may lead to more serious problems such as heart disease, stroke or kidney failure, which can result in more serious consequences for the patients and their families,” said Dr. M. Basheer Ahmed, the clinic chairman.

“Al-Shifa Clinic served 1,200 patients in year 2006, 1,500 patients in 2007, and the number of patients has increased to 1,800 in the year 2008,” Ahmed said.

Muslim Clinic, Ohio. Muslim-American doctors in Ohio joined the Give Back Convoy, a group of Muslim doctors who opened the first free clinic in Ohio run by Muslim physicians in 2008. The clinic now offers free health care services to underserved populations. “It is a small attempt by Muslims to help solve the health insurance crisis in America,” said Dr. Esam Alkhawaga, a psychiatrist.

The clinic is based in Montgomery County, the region around Dayton, Ohio. “It serves adults and children, regardless of race or religion,” Alkhawaga said. The county “has nearly 70,000 uninsured residents, about 13 percent of its population.”

Dr. Ramzieh Azmeh, the co-founder of the Ohio Free Clinic, said, “At least 15 Muslim primary care physicians are signed up and credentialed to work at the Muslim Clinic of Ohio,” and “another 50 specialists are also ready to contribute.”

Alkhawaga said, “Our goal is to engage the Muslim community in outreach work, and let people know that Muslims are part of this community.”

“Most of us are physicians and we felt as Muslims this could be the least we could do to give back to America for what they’ve done for us,” Alkhawaga said.

Muslim Outreach Free Clinic, Michigan. In June 2009, a group of Flint-area physicians wanted to address the community’s health care crisis and decided to use their skills and expertise to help the Flint community. They established the Muslim Outreach Free Clinic, which opened by offering a half-day of free health care services per week to lower-income people.

“Our main goal is to serve people who don’t qualify for any kind of health insurance and don’t have enough income to afford anything on their own,” Dr. Ahmed Arif said. “We’ve also contacted diagnostic facilities and labs who’ll provide us with free services. A lot of people have been very generous and forthcoming to help us provide all aspects of care for long-term and chronic illnesses.”

Muslim doctors in Minnesota also accepted the challenge. The Islamic Center of Minnesota has taken on the role of a first-access, primary-care clinic for anyone who needs it with the Al-Shifa Clinic.

“It is our Islamic duty to address the issue of providing people with equal access to health care. We serve anyone in the community, both Muslim and non-Muslim,” said Sobia Sarwar, clinic coordinator. “It’s the volunteer doctors that really make it happen. Without their skill set we really would not be able to contribute to the community. The fact that they dedicate their time and effort is enormous.”

Asia Pacific Bulletin - Japan's 'electoral revolution'

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Abstract

The Japanese general election was revolutionary: it brought to power for the first time since the end of World War II a majority government not led by the Liberal Democratic Party and it saw the final transition to a two-party system brought about by the introduction of single-member electorates 15 years ago. Like any revolution, it will be some time before it is clear if the pressures of real power will allow the new Democratic Party government to bring about promised change.

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US-Iran Talks Start October 1 - Nation

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posted by Robert Dreyfuss on 09/14/2009

The hawks, neoconservatives, and Israeli hardliners are squealing, but the US and Iran are set to talk. The talks will begin October 1, among Iran and the P5 + 1, the permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany.

Mohammed ElBaradei, the outgoing head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was ebullient, even as he urged Iran to "engage substantively with the agency," saying:

"Addressing the concerns of the international community about Iran's future intentions is primarily a matter of confidence-building, which can only be achieved through dialogue. I therefore welcome the offer of the US to initiate a dialogue with Iran, without preconditions and on the basis of mutual respect."

That's exactly the right tone and message, and it underscores that President Obama is doing precisely what he campaigned on, namely, to open a dialogue with Iran. It's an effort that began with his comments on Iran during his inaugural address, his videotaped Nowruz message to Iran last winter, a pair of quiet messages to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Leader, and Obama's careful and balanced response to the post-election crisis over the summer. Once started, the talks aren't likely to have a swift conclusion, but the very fact that they're taking place will make it impossible for hawks to argue successfully either for harsh, "crippling" sanctions on Iran or for a military attack.

That didn't stop Bibi Netanyahu, for one, from trying. Speaking to Israel's foreign affairs and defense committee today, the Israeli leader said:

"I believe that now is the time to start harsh sanctions against Iran -- if not now then when? These harsh sanctions can be effective. I believe that the international community can act effectively. The Iranian regime is weak, the Iranian people would not rally around the regime if they felt for the first time that there was a danger to their regime -- and this would be a new situation."

Netanyahu's belief in sanctions, harsh measures, and regime change was echoed by John Hannah, the former top aide to Vice President Cheney, who wrote an op-ed criticizing Obama for taking regime change off the table in dealing with Iran. Hannah utterly ignored the fact that eight years of anti-Iran, pro-regime change bombast from the Bush-Cheney administration did nothing but strengthen Iran's hawks, while Obama's softer, dialogue-centered approach to Iran helped boost the power of the reformists and their allies in Iranian politics. Indeed, it was precisely Obama's less belligerent tone that confused the Iranian hardliners, emboldened the liberals, reformists and pragmatists in Iran, and therefore did more to create the conditions for "regime change" than anything that Bush, Cheney, and Hannah did.

Nevertheless, here's Hannah:

"It is ironic, of course, that just as the Obama administration seemed prepared to write off regime change forever, the Iranian people have made it a distinct possibility. It would be tragic indeed if the United States took steps to bolster the staying power of Iran's dictatorship at precisely the moment when so many Iranians appear prepared to risk everything to be rid of it. It would also seem strategically shortsighted to risk throwing this regime a lifeline."

Hannah adds that whatever happens in the talks, Obama had better be careful not to undermine the possibility that the regime might collapse. "However engagement now unfolds, Obama should do nothing to undermine this historic opportunity."

Other, less temperate hawks have forthrightly condemned Iran's offer to negotiate. The Weekly Standard ridiculed Iran's five-page statement on opening negotiations:

"The Iranian response is a bad joke. It makes a complete mockery of the situation."

And the churlish Washington Post, in an editorial written before the US agreed to start talks with Iran, huffed that Iran's offer to talk was a "non-response" and complained that so far Obama has had no results:

"President Obama's offer of direct diplomacy evidently has produced no change in the stance taken by Iran during the George W. Bush administration, when Tehran proposed discussing everything from stability in the Balkans to the development of Latin America with the United States and its allies -- but refused to consider even a temporary shutdown of its centrifuges."

And the Post again brought up the importance of getting "tough" with Iran and pushing for sanctions, a la Netanyahu, even though neither Russia nor China will have anything to do with more sanctions. (The Europeans don't really want more sanctions either, though they say they do. And Venezuela has offered to export whatever gasoline Iran needs if, in fact, the United States tries to impose a cut-off of refined petroleum products imported by Iran.)

We can only hope, now, that the United States and the rest of the P5 + 1 will table an offer to Iran to allow Tehran to maintain its uranium enrichment program, on its own soil, combined with a system of stronger international inspections. That's the end game: not regime change, not Big Bad Wolf threats of military action, not Hillary Clinton-style "crippling sanctions," not an Iran without uranium enrichment -- but an Iran that is ushered into the age of peaceful use of nuclear energy, including enrichment, in exchange for a comprehensive settlement.

Stuff Some White People Don't Like | The American Prospect

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by Paul Waldman

Back when Barack Obama began his extraordinary quest for the presidency, lots of conservatives -- particularly those prone to wake screaming in the night from visions of Madam President Hillary Clinton -- just couldn't say enough nice things about him. What attracted them most was not his intellect or political skill: It was the way he handled race. Right-wing stalwart William Bennett may have best summed up the feeling when he gushed that Obama "never brings race into it. He never plays the race card. Talk about the black community -- he has taught the black community you don't have to act like Jesse Jackson; you don't have to act like Al Sharpton."

The post-racial honeymoon couldn't last, of course. During the campaign, conservative forces worked overtime to define Obama by his race, from the attacks on his wife as an "angry black woman" (Fox News once referred to her as Barack's "baby mama") to the way they gleefully seized on Jeremiah Wright in an attempt to turn Obama into Black Panther Huey Newton. "It is clear that Senator Obama has disowned his white half. He's decided he's got to go all in on the black side," said Rush Limbaugh, making sure his listeners were not deceived into thinking Obama was anything but a black militant. .

A year and a half later, you might think Obama is some kind of racial King Midas, turning everything he touches into a race-inflected debate. But he's not the one for whom race is so important. There are some people who just can't help seeing this president through race-colored glasses.

Let's be absolutely clear -- many people who dislike the president or his agenda are perfectly comfortable with his race. After all, just under 60 million Americans voted for John McCain, and they did so for many reasons. But it's becoming clear that the presence of a black man in the Oval Office, combined with the increasingly diverse makeup of the American public -- most particularly the growing number of Latinos -- is causing some to not only see terrible threats in things they cared very little about a year ago. It's also causing them to cast aside any pretense of commitment to the basic legitimacy of the American system as it exists today.

The current fight over health-care reform is the arena in which this trend is becoming evident, but the details of that issue are not really motivating the most intense opponents. When you show up at a town hall debate and yell that reform represents "socialized medicine," you just don't know much about socialism (or health care, for that matter). But when you come to that town hall and shout "I want my America back!" through tears, you aren't talking about health care at all.

It is plain that a great many people simply do not believe Barack Obama legitimately occupies the office of president of the United States. Some -- the "birthers" -- think he was really born in Kenya, and benefited from an elaborate conspiracy to falsify documents demonstrating otherwise -- in other words, not American at all. Some have reacted to policies they oppose by reviving a neo-Confederate claim that states don't have to abide by laws passed by the federal government if they don't like them. These are the "tenthers," who believe that the tenth amendment makes virtually everything the federal government does unconstitutional, from Medicare to building interstate highways to regulating airlines. So long as the wrong man's in the White House, that is.

It goes on. When George W. Bush was president, wearing a T-shirt simply saying "Protect our civil liberties" could get you thrown out of a rally and threatened with arrest; today, conservatives come to see the president toting firearms. Talk-show hosts warn darkly that government actions they don't like aren't merely bad policy -- they're totalitarianism. Extremists begin stockpiling weapons in preparation for an imagined government crackdown. When the president plans to tell kids to work hard and stay in school, people on the right complain to school officials and keep their children home, lest the impressionable young ones have to listen to Obama's "socialist indoctrination." And members of Congress decide that shouting out insults during presidential addresses is now within the bounds of decorum.

What all of this has in common is a rejection of the mores of American democracy. There were some things that people on the left and right used to agree on. You might not like it if Congress passes the president's agenda, but the law is the law. You might not like the president himself, but you're not going to make a big stink about it when he does things like pardon turkeys on Thanksgiving or tell kids to study hard and stay in school. You might not want to vote for what the president is arguing for, but if you're a member of Congress you don't heckle him like you're a drunken frat boy in a comedy club.

For all the passion and, at times, anger in our politics, those things used to be true. But not anymore.

It isn't just a random protester here or an obscure blogger there who are showing this rejectionism. The branches of the conservative crazy tree reach much farther into the establishment than anything comparable on the left. There are leftists who think weird things, but they are treated with scorn by Democrats. In contrast, there are members of the United States Congress who believe that President Obama may have forged his birth certificate. Probable 2012 presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota -- heretofore known as a modern, moderate Republican -- recently started talking about "asserting our tenth amendment rights" to nullify federal laws. Pawlenty was lining up behind a series of Republican politicians, including Texas governor Rick Perry, South Carolina senator Jim DeMint, and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. And does anyone think it's an accident that the now-famous Congressman Joe Wilson is a former aide to segregationist Strom Thurmond and a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who supported keeping the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina statehouse? And is anyone surprised that what really had Wilson so mad was the prospect that somewhere, an undocumented immigrant might get health coverage? One of Wilson's constituents who recently lost her own coverage explained her misgivings about health reform by saying, "We're without insurance, and I do think some folks should get government health care. But they have to be American."

For the people who appreciate the vigorous pandering of conservative politicians, who believe that Obama has no right to the office he occupies, who are now wielding "Don't Tread On Me" banners as though they were oppressed by a foreign occupier, it's all beginning to make sense. Glenn Beck, who has become the key media figure of the anti-Obama movement, tells them Obama harbors "a deep-seated hatred for white people." They've lost "their" America, the one where a certain distribution of privilege and power was unquestioned. In 2009, being in the political minority isn't just a drag -- it's cause to discard your commitment to the system as we've known it.

During the post-election wrangling of 2000, numerous commentators said that the fact that there weren't tanks in the streets was a tribute to American democracy. In the end, we'd settle the argument through our established institutions, and everyone would respect the results. (Imagine for a moment if Obama had won the way George W. Bush won -- with fewer votes than his opponent, and only through the employment of a combination of ruthless hardball tactics and the intercession of a friendly Supreme Court majority.) That was supposed to be what made us so admirable. It seems like so long ago.

There is nothing we can do to escape tribalism; it is written on every page of human history. As our own society grows more complex and diverse, we become members of multiple overlapping tribes that we use to differentiate ourselves from others. We define "us" and "them" by our age, the place we live, our religious beliefs, our favorite sports, the kind of music we favor, and our taste in various consumer goods, to name but a few.

But there are some things we're all supposed to share, including a willingness to submit to the results of democracy even when we don't like those results. For a growing number of Americans, the presence of a certain kind of person in the White House calls that willingness into question.

The Return of the Repressed | The American Prospect

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by Michelle Goldberg

Now that popular conservatism has given itself over so avidly to racial resentment, it's curious to remember how hard the right once tried to scrub itself of the lingering taint of prejudice. Indeed, for a decade and a half the Christian right -- until recently the most powerful and visible grassroots conservative movement -- struggled mightily to escape its own bigoted history. In his 1996 book Active Faith, Ralph Reed acknowledged that Christian conservatives had been on the wrong side of the civil rights movement. "The white evangelical church carries a shameful legacy of racism and the historical baggage of indifference to the most central struggle for social justice in this century, a legacy that is only now being wiped clean by the sanctifying work of repentance and racial reconciliation," wrote Reed.

"Racial reconciliation" became a kind of buzz phrase. The idea animated Promise Keepers meetings. "Racism is an insidious monster," Bill McCartney, the group's founder, said at a 39,000-man Atlanta rally. "You can't say you love God and not love your brother." The Traditional Values Coalition distributed a video called "Gay Rights, Special Rights" to black churches; it criticized the gay rights movement for co-opting the noble legacy of the civil rights struggle.

Throughout the Bush years, homophobia and professions of anti-racism were twinned in a weird way, as if the latter proved that the right wasn't simply still skulking around history's dark side. At a deeply surreal 2006 event at the Greater Exodus Baptist Church, an African American church in downtown Philadelphia, leaders of the religious right invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks on behalf of gay marriage bans and Bush's judicial nominees. At the end of the evening, several dozen clergymen, black and white, joined hands in prayer at the front of the room. "Black Americans, white Americans," said a beaming Tony Perkins, leader of the Family Research Council. "Christians, standing together." The whole premise of compassionate conservatism -- which shoveled taxpayer money towards administration-friendly churches like Greater Exodus Baptist -- was that the right cared as deeply as the left about issues like inner city poverty.

What a difference an election makes. Even if you believed that compassionate conservatism was always a bit of a con, it's amazing to see how quickly it has vanished, and how fast an older style of reaction, one more explicitly rooted in racial grievance, has reasserted itself.

Today's grassroots right is by all appearances as socially conservative as ever, but its tone and its rhetoric are profoundly different than they were even a year ago. For the last 15 years, the right-wing populism has been substantially electrified by sexual anxiety. Now it's charged with racial anxiety. By all accounts, there were more confederate flags than crosses at last weekend's anti-Obama rally in Washington, DC. Glenn Beck has become a far more influential figure on the right than, say, James Dobson, and he's much more interested in race than in sexual deviancy. For the first time in at least a decade, middle class whites have been galvanized by the fear that their taxes are benefiting lazy, shiftless others. The messianic, imperialistic, hubristic side of the right has gone into retreat, and a cramped, mean and paranoid style has come to the fore.

To some extent, a newfound suspicion of government was probably inevitable as soon as Democrats took power. At the same time, with the implosion of the Christian right's leadership and the last year's cornucopia of GOP sex scandals, the party needed to take a break from incessant moralizing, and required a new ideology to take the place of family values cant. The belief system analysts sometimes call "producerism" served nicely. Producerism sees society as divided between productive workers -- laborers, small businessmen and the like -- and the parasites who live off them. Those parasites exist at both the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy -- they are both financiers and welfare bums -- and their larceny is enabled by the government they control.

Producerism has often been a trope of right-wing movements, especially during times of economic distress, when many people sense they're getting screwed. Its racist (and often anti-Semitic) potential is obvious, so it gels well with the climate of Dixiecrat racial angst occasioned by the election of our first black president. The result is the return of the repressed.

It's not, after all, as if the Christian right was something completely removed from the old racist right -- rather, as Reed acknowledged all those years ago, they were initially deeply intertwined. The Columbia historian Randall Balmer has shown that Christian conservatives were not, contrary to their own mythology, initially mobilized by their outrage at Roe vs. Wade. Rather, what spurred them into action was the IRS's attempt to revoke the tax-exempt status of whites only Christian schools, schools that had been created specifically to evade desegregation.

The Christian right was always rooted in an older style of reactionary politics. Before he became a political organizer himself, Falwell -- who ran one of those Christian segregation academies -- attacked Martin Luther King Jr. for his political activism. ("Preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners," he said.) Before Tony Perkins was basking in homophobic interracial amity, he paid Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,500 for his mailing list. In 2004, David Barton, then the vice president of the Texas GOP, spoke at an event featuring white preachers and ministry workers dropping to their knees before their black brethren to plead for forgiveness. Thirteen years earlier, Barton had twice been a featured speaker at meetings of the Christian Identity movement, which preaches that blacks are sub-human "mud people." One could go on and on.

As racism grew politically unacceptable, the Christian right was able to channel resentment over the decline of white male privilege into a Kulterkampf directed at more acceptable enemies, like gays and lesbians. The movement borrowed heavily from Catholic theology and convinced itself that it was in a righteous struggle against a culture of death, not a culture of diversity. Now the mask is off. One wonders if fifteen years from now, they'll bother apologizing all over again.

Threat of Trade War With China Sparks Worries in a Debtor U.S. - washingtonpost.com

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By Steven Mufson and Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, September 15, 2009

The prospect of a trade war with China fueled fears of wider fallout Monday, rattling bond markets and prompting many economists to criticize President Obama's decision to slap import tariffs on Chinese-made tires.

Traders fretted that the 35 percent tariffs might prompt China to send a sign of disapproval by paring purchases of U.S. government bonds. And a chorus of economists and climate activists fretted that the president's action might undercut U.S.-China climate talks and poison relations just two weeks before the summit of the Group of 20 major economies to be held in Pittsburgh.

Moreover, economists argued that it would all be for nothing; they said tariffs on Chinese tires would probably boost U.S. imports from countries like Poland and Mexico and do little to help the American steelworkers whose union brought the trade action in the first place.

Obama said Monday on CNBC that the tariffs, which were announced late Friday night, were necessary to maintain the "credibility" of trade agreements. "I'm not surprised that China is upset about it, but keep in mind, we have a huge economic relationship with China," he said.

China's commerce minister, Chen Deming, called Obama's action an "abuse" of trade provisions and said it "sends the wrong signal to the world." China said it would look into punitive measures against U.S. exports of auto and poultry parts.

"I think it's a terrible message in the run-up to the G-20, and we are all very concerned about the escalation of protectionist measures," said Uri Dadush, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and long-time international trade director at the World Bank.

"If there were any prospect of the United States taking the moral high ground in Pittsburgh at the G-20, there isn't any longer, and that's unfortunate," said Daniel Rosen, partner at the advisory firm Rhodium Group and a former senior adviser for Asia at the National Economic Council. "Instead . . . people are going to be talking about the U.S. and China squabbling over tires and chickens."

One person who said such fears are overblown: Leo W. Gerard, the former nickel mineworker and leader of the United Steelworkers who instigated the current flap by filing the trade complaint that pushed Obama to impose a tariff on Chinese tires imports. Brushing aside concerns over a trade war or China's purchases of mountains of U.S. debt, he said that China exports far more than it imports and so has much more to lose.

"Eh," Gerard said when asked about fears of Chinese retaliation. "Are they going to kick the three chickens out they let in? . . . We've got into a situation now where everyone's afraid to tick off our banker," he said. "If our government had the guts to retaliate, [China] is going to be on the losing end."

The Obama administration also said it was not worried. "We do not expect that it will have an impact on the broader relationship," said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. He said that there had been a "robust effort" by the administration to negotiate with China for a settlement on tires before imposing import tariffs. He asserted that U.S. imports of Chinese tires, which more than tripled since 2004, clearly met the test for tariffs aimed at reducing "surges" in imports.

But when asked about whether the United States would simply import from other nations, he conceded that "it is hard to predict the impact with specificity."

'Not to Be Provocative'

"A healthy economy in the 21st century also depends on our ability to buy and sell goods in markets across the globe. And make no mistake, this administration is committed to pursuing expanded trade and new trade agreements," Obama said in a speech Monday in New York's financial district.

"But no trading system will work if we fail to enforce our trade agreements," he added. "So when -- as happened this weekend -- we invoke provisions of existing agreements, we do so not to be provocative or to promote self-defeating protectionism. We do so because enforcing trade agreements is part and parcel of maintaining an open and free trading system."

There are reasons why the dust-up over tires might settle down. China exports three times as much to the United States as it imports from the United States. It also has relatively few secure places to park its huge foreign-exchange reserves other than U.S. Treasury bonds and government-backed U.S. mortgage securities.

Thea Lee, an economist and policy director for the AFL-CIO, said the concern over an incipient trade war was overblown and called China's reaction "blustering."

"The Chinese government is trying to raise the rhetoric and scare off the U.S. We should not be scared off," she said. "We are within our rights. . . . It's not the beginning of a trade war."

From 2004 to last year, the number of Chinese tires imported in the United States more than tripled and their share of the U.S. market rose from 5 percent to 17 percent. Over the same period, the share of the U.S. market served by U.S. factories declined by a corresponding amount. More than 5,000 U.S. jobs were lost.

Opponents of the tariff say the U.S. industry's shrinkage is unrelated to the surge in Chinese imports. U.S. manufacturers, they say, have strategically moved into pricier, more profitable tires, shifting production of cheaper tires overseas. Yao Jian, a Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesman, said, "Four U.S. companies have tire production operations in China and account for two-thirds of exports to the U.S. The tariffs will have a direct impact on them."

Under the so-called "421 clause" that China agreed to as part of its bid to gain admission to the World Trade Organization, the United States does not need to prove unfair trade practices.

Bad Timing?

But other observers said the timing was particularly bad, regardless of the case's merits. "They may have the basis for doing this, but the point in my mind is not the legality but the overall political impact and the message this gives the world," said Dadush of the World Bank. "Over the last several months, Chinese imports are exploding and thank God for that because that's holding up all of Asia and having a good impact on the rest of the world." By contrast, he said, U.S. imports are declining.

Moreover, globally, new requests for protection from imports in the first half of 2009 are up 18.5 percent over the first half of 2008, according to the World Bank-sponsored Global Antidumping Database, organized by Chad P. Bown, a Brandeis University economics professor. That increase follows a 44 percent increase in new investigations in 2008.

On Tuesday, Obama is scheduled to address the AFL-CIO's annual convention. Some analysts said that the tire tariffs were a political favor to trade unions, whose support Obama needs for health-care reform and who backed Obama in the 2008 election. Gerard dismissed the idea that the tire tariffs were political payback. The people who say that "are smoking something," he said.

Some observers said Obama might follow the Bush administration, which initially seemed to adopt a tough stance on trade. In March 2002, President Bush imposed tariffs on foreign steel, but later he backed off and rejected proposals to impose trade sanctions for other products.

"He pulled the plug on us because he didn't think we were grateful enough," Gerard said. "He didn't have the guts to enforce the law. He basically invited the Chinese to keep doing the same thing."

Whoriskey reported from Pittsburgh.