North African & Middle Eastern uprisings

[Psyber]

I havn't given up on women, I just won't marry one (again)

I'm not getting married until I meet the right small group of women!

There are some advantages to embracing Islam - four sounds about right...

[mick]

I havn't given up on women, I just won't marry one (again)

I'm not getting married until I meet the right small group of women!

There are some advantages to embracing Islam - four sounds about right...

Not if they are all having their period at the same time As a medical man you know about the phenomenon of synchronised menstrual cylces of women living together? Imagine copping shit from four simultaneously. Concubines living in separate houses is perhaps the solution.

[Psyber]

Not if they are all having their period at the same time As a medical man you know about the phenomenon of synchronised menstrual cylces of women living together? Imagine copping **** from four simultaneously. Concubines living in separate houses is perhaps the solution.

The medical solution is to put them all on the "pill" but carefully out of synchronisation.
Then two can keep jobs, and one can work the day shift and home and one the night shift waiting on their Lord and Master.
Obviously job sharing is essential to maintain the necessary rotating roster.
Islamic divorce laws also facilitate keeping a sub on the bench.

I have one concern - am I being "racist" or exercising "religious intolerance" making this joke??
Will the PC world comer to get me?

[dedja]

I havn't given up on women, I just won't marry one (again)

I'm not getting married until I meet the right small group of women!

There are some advantages to embracing Islam - four sounds about right...

Not if they are all having their period at the same time As a medical man you know about the phenomenon of synchronised menstrual cylces of women living together? Imagine copping **** from four simultaneously. Concubines living in separate houses is perhaps the solution.

Try living with a wife and 3 daughters ...

[fish]

West launches first strike on Libya

The United States, France and Britain have pounded Libya with air strikes and Tomahawk missiles in the first phase of military operations to force leader Moamar Gaddafi from power.

US and British military forces have launched more than 100 cruise missiles, targeting Libyan air defence systems.

France began military action in the face of initial US reluctance, starting the assault earlier on Saturday (local time) with a series of air strikes.

The action came hours after Western and Arab leaders met in Paris to agree on a course of action to confront Mr Gaddafi.

[Pseudo]

France began military action in the face of initial US reluctance, starting the assault earlier on Saturday (local time) with a series of air strikes.

and then...

[redandblack]

Jokes thread

[dedja]

Unfortunately, the West only give a rats when there's oil around ...

[Q.]

http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/03/23/dictator-watch-yemen-going-going-gone/

President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s 32-year reign in Yemen is over, and the Middle East revolution has deposed its third dictator, his opponents claim.

Not so, says the US-backed Yemeni strongman, who yesterday warned that Yemen will descend into bloody civil war — just like Libya — if his opponents try to depose him.

Either way, the next 24 hours could be crucial. More than half the Yemeni army and at least six of its top generals have defected to the protesters, and forces from opposing sides are now drawn up in the capital Sana’a.

[Psyber]

Unfortunately, the West only give a rats when there's oil around ...

Sadly, there has been truth in that, as the historical record shows.
It does seem the US may have learned from Iraq that even a nominally Christian force cannot occupy a Muslim country without generating a backlash.
That applies no matter how happy the inhabitants were for the aid in deposing the dictator in the first place.

[Bat Pad]

Unfortunately, the West only give a rats when there's oil around ...

Sadly, there has been truth in that, as the historical record shows.It does seem the US may have learned from Iraq that even a nominally Christian force cannot occupy a Muslim country without generating a backlash.
That applies no matter how happy the inhabitants were for the aid in deposing the dictator in the first place.

How far are we going back? Last ten years that may be true with Iraq 2 and Libya, don't think Afghanistan is rich in oil. Go back 30 years. Kosovo, Somalia, Panama not sure. Iraq 1 yes. What ones have I missed.

[Squawk]

Bat Pad, some would argue East Timor as well.

I came across this a while ago - see para 1 on page 3, where Ambassador Bleich acknowledges the need to have security of oil supplies.

http://photos.state.gov/libraries/adelaide/171311/speeches/20100625.pdf

[Psyber]

How far are we going back? Last ten years that may be true with Iraq 2 and Libya, don't think Afghanistan is rich in oil. Go back 30 years. Kosovo, Somalia, Panama not sure. Iraq 1 yes. What ones have I missed.

You could, for example, make a case that Indonesian oil was a factor in the US [and Oz] not raising a fuss when western New Guinea was annexed by military invasion, and turned into West Irian in the mid 1970s.
[Mineral deposits and Lebensraum were also factors for the Indonesians.]

There may be a case for the propping up of the Shah of Persia, and the supporting Saddam Hussein and helping him set up his dictatorship too.
But I wasn't paying world politics a lot of attention then so I'm not sure.

[Q.]

http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/03/25/dictator-watch-syrians-continue-to-protest-despite-massacres/

Yet another Middle Eastern dictator is on the run. President Bashar al Assad, whose family has ruled Syria with an iron fist for the last 40 years, is facing the biggest-ever challenge to his rule. Friday is likely to be critical, after a call for mass demonstrations around the country.

Yesterday, President Assad was forced to promise a wave of political reforms — including maybe lifting the 50-year state of emergency — after security forces killed 100 demonstrators in the southern town of Daraa.

The claimed massacre started in the early hours of Wednesday morning with an armed assault by security forces on the town’s al-Omari mosque, where hundreds have been gathered in protest since a demonstration last Friday in which five people were killed.

After a day of heavy shooting, 25 bodies were dumped in Daraa’s main hospital, riddled with bullet holes, according to local doctors. But human rights activists claim the death toll is more than 100. Videos posted on You Tube show bodies lying in the street in pools of blood and close-ups of horrible injuries, with automatic gunfire in the background.

[OnSong]

Hope your lunch has settled before watching that.

[Q.]

Not so much North Africa as it is West Africa, but mainstream media is finally starting to report on the political situation in Cote d'Ivoire, which only recently has boiled over with heavy bloodshed. Basically, Laurent Ggabo has refused to relinquish power after his opposition won the elections. There is a brilliant blog - http://nofoodforlazyman.blogspot.com/ - which has been giving an on-ground account of life in the country.

The following is a story available to Crikey Subscribers:

Dictator Watch: Ivory Coast stained with blood of 800 dead
by Paul Barry

So much for avoiding a bloodbath in West Africa’s war-torn Ivory Coast.

It is now clear at least 800 people have been massacred in the small cocoa-growing town of Dekoue — near the Liberian border — which fell to Alassane Ouattara’s republican forces last week.

What’s not yet clear is who did the killing, but it appears that Laurent Gbagbo’s pro-government soldiers began the bloodbath before Ouattara’s rebels set about taking revenge.

As the Red Cross goes about the grisly business of picking hundreds of bodies off the streets and out of the bushes, the UN’s mission in Cote d’Ivoire has blamed Ouattara’s forces for at least 200 of the deaths, which fit into a long history of ethnic violence between the Guere and Dioula people.

And that’s a major embarrassment for the West, which has thrown its support behind the former World Bank official, who was elected president last November.

Ten days ago, Ouattara was lauded by Barack Obama as the leader the Ivory Coast deserved — without any intended irony.

The killings also mark a failure for the UN, which has almost 10,000 soldiers in the Ivory Coast protecting civilians, and that has been playing the difficult role of peacekeeper in the country since 2004. The UN failed to prevent similar (but smaller) ethnic killings in Dekoue in 2005.

Ouattara’s new government — which now claims to control of most of the country and 90% of the commercial capital, Abidjan — has denied any responsibility for the latest massacre and promised to “bring all perpetrators of abuses against civilians to justice in national and international courts”.

Meanwhile, fighting is still raging in Abidjan around the presidential palace, where Laurent Gbagbo’s elite forces are holed up, and the French government is contemplating evacuating 12,000 French citizens from the country. French forces have also taken control of the airport.

The UN High Commission for Refugees has warned that 250,000 people are expected to flee across the border into neighbouring Liberia, creating a further humanitarian crisis.


It's sad that we have a cry over a few hundred boat arrivals, when there are countries taking in hundreds of thousands of refugees

[Q.]

Dictator Watch: UN peacekeepers attack Gbagbo’s palace

by Paul Barry

After the slaughter in Srebrenica and Rwanda — while UN forces stood idly by — who would have expected UN peacekeepers to use their firepower to prevent a bloodbath?

But that’s exactly what’s they have done in the Ivory Coast, where civil war has terrorised the population, created 1 million refugees and seen at least 1000 people killed.

Last night UN and French attack helicopters fired four missiles into Laurent Gbagbo’s presidential palace and a nearby military camp in Abidjan to destroy heavy weapons that the UN claims were being fired on civilians.

President Gbagbo’s French adviser, Alain Toussaint, immediately declared the attacks to be an act of war, telling AFP, “They are war crimes. The end result of this action is the assassination of President Gbagbo.”

Another Gbagbo supporter asked incredulously, “How is it that France can now openly use its military force to attack the Ivory Coast and to support the rebel force in its military objectives? May the world be forgiven for the horrors that it allows today and the horrors that will come tomorrow.”

But others were just as passionate in support. “I think this is terrific news!” one commented on a BBC blog. “Gbagbo is a dictator, and there is only one way to deal with dictators. I stand with Ouattara, and pray that democracy finally comes to the Ivory Coast.”

No doubt the UN and the West, who have thrown their weight behind the legitimately elected president, Alassane Ouattara, share that hope.

There’s some amazing footage of the fighting, showing shells or missiles exploding on the camp and rockets being fired back. Check out the birdsong in the background and the strains of Edith Piaf amid the bangs.

[Q.]

Seeya!

[Q.]

The following is a blog entry from West Africa Wins Always written by a reporter living in Cote d'Ivoire:


Last month I cursed the thick concrete walls of my bungalow as I tried to hang a picture on the living room wall. Hammers and nails were useless. Even the drill failed. Yesterday, as I ran to find shelter from bullets whizzing overhead, I was glad to know the concrete walls were offering relative safety. Abidjan has been under siege for almost a week now, and the fighting near my neighborhood has at times been so fierce I had to hide in the bathroom to wait it out. There haven’t been any gun battles in my street, but I live close enough to Gbagbo’s residence to get woken up by the sound of heavy artillery almost every day. A stray machine gun bullet pierced the neighbor’s metal garage door and lodged itself into his car. Another stray bullet tore through the living room wall of a family living two houses down the street.

Like most residents, I have been locked inside since last Thursday amid sporadic bursts of gun fire, the unnerving shocks of grenade explosions or the sound of helicopters circling over the city. When the shooting dies down, an eerie silence settles over the day, punctuated only by chirping birds. The Ouattara government has imposed a daytime curfew from noon. My friends have stopped calling because they have run out of phone credit, and as I have run out of phone credit myself, I have to use my boyfriend’s phone to find out what is going on elsewhere in the city. I am all too aware that I am relatively well off: I still have three kilos of rice, two bags of pasta, and six cans of tuna in the kitchen cupboard, and the watchman miraculously managed to find a crate of beer.

Things began looking dire after a power outage that lasted for almost three days, including one day without running water. Abidjan is a hot and humid place, and food left outside the fridge starts to decay almost immediately. We were still laughing when we rinsed the dirty dishes in the swimming pool, and my boyfriend managed to hook up his car battery to a small inverter to power our laptops and charge our phones. But we had forgotten to buy a torch light and the car battery finished quickly, leaving us with the worrying prospect of a complete communications blackout.

This morning, finally, the power came back. Having electricity again feels like an incredible luxury after two nights of treading carefully around a pitch-dark house. I’ve also found out why two lone gunmen were emptying their AK-47’s in my street last night, a deafening noise so scary I hunkered down beside the bed. A neighbor told me that Ouattara’s troops are in control of our area now, and they were ‘simply’ trying to ward off looters. These are small comforts in an absurd and unnecessary war that will mark Ivory Coast for years to come.

[Q.]

And another entry:



This is the first corpse I have seen during the crisis, and hopefully the last. It's also the first day I cautiously drove around the neighborhood after having been locked inside for nearly two weeks. Power has changed hands. Gbagbo is out, humiliated, defeated. Ouattara has finally managed to grab the presidential seat he has been eyeing since 1993. In the simplified language of the media, the power struggle was described as a bad guy vs. good guy narrative. I think there was definitely a bad guy, or rather, a stubborn and increasingly delusional leader, but the ‘goodness’ of his rival has yet to be proven. And the first signs are not encouraging. Ouattara started off in the worst imaginable conditions, his speeches lack compassion, and his FRCI army bears all the hallmarks of a rebel group. The FRCI is gradually gaining control over the city and seems to hunting for thieves and looters among its ranks. Neighborhood grocer Salif walked to the bakery this morning and was a witness to the execution of four “thugs” in military uniform who were about to drive off in a car without license plates. They were cornered by scores of more official-looking FRCI military who came racing past the corner and opened fire at the car. Salif was shaking his head in disbelief as he told me the story – he was still in shock. Three men were killed instantly and their bodies dumped in the FRCI truck. The fourth was still moving and left to die on the sidewalk. But killing thieves is a good thing, Salif believes. “Otherwise they kill us if they have a chance.” Later on, a spokesman for Ouattara confirmed that the Republican Forces are “trying to get our rogue elements under control”.