KONTRADIKSI DAN DILEMA POLITIK MALAYSIA KINI
Oleh: Kassim Ahmad
28 November, 2010
sidangruh@gmail.com
Bukan pada tahun 2008, apabila Barisan Nasional gagal mendapat majoriti dua pertiga dalam Parlimen dan hilang kuasa di empat buah negeri, tetapi lama sebelum itu, ahli-ahli UMNO sendiri teleh mengutuk pemimpin-pemimpin mereka sendiri, kerana korupsi dan penyelewengan. Tentunya bukan semua yang korup dan seleweng. Tetapi, seperti kata pepatah, kerana nila setitik, rosak susu sebelanga!
Lumrahlah yang berkuasa terlalu lama akan lupa daratan, lupa akan amanah yang mereka pikul, dan mengundang kemarahan rakyat. Demikianlah gerakan reformasi bermula di Indonesia dan menjatuhkan Suharto. Penyingkiran dan penahanan Anwar Ibrahim menyebabkan gerakan reformasi tumbuh dan berakar-umbi di Malaysia. Aliran politik baru ini berkembang selaras dengan tumbuhnya sentimen di kalangan pengundi untuk mengadakan sistem dwi-parti di negara kita, satu “barisan alternatif” untuk menggantikan Barisan Nasional. Inilah yang melahirkan Pakatan Rakyat, yang sebelum ini gagal diwujudkan di antara parti-parti pembangkang.
Setelah berkuasa selama dua tahun, Pakatan Rakyat menghadapi masalah-masalah dalamannya sendiri. Tidak syak lagi, dengan kebolehan berpidatonya disertakan dengan strategi dan taktik yang licik, Anwar Ibrahim, “anugerah Tuhan kepada rakyat Malaysia” mengikut Presiden PKR, telah memainkan peranan yang utama bagi kemenangan Pakatan Rakyat dalam pilihanraya umum ke-12. Tetapi, harus diingat, kepimpinan yang baik tidak terletak kepada kebolehan berpidato dan strategi dan taktik yang licik. Ia terletak kepada visi dan falsafah yang utuh, kejujuran, kecerdikan dan kebijaksanaan.
Sedar atau tidak, sebuah parti atau sebuah gabungan parti-parti mesti tumbuh dan berdiri di atas suatu falsafah perjuangan yang jelas dan kukuh. Tanpa asas ini, ia tidak akan kekal. Kita tahu UMNO dan Barisan Nasional diwujudkan untuk mencapai dan mengisi kemerdekaan nasional kita. “Nasional” di sini ditakrifkan sebagai perkongsian kuasa di antara tiga komponen penting: Raja-Raja Melayu, Orang Melayu, dan Orang Bukan-Melayu. Ketiga-tiga komponen penting ini dan hak-hak mereka dilembagakan dengan kukuh dalam Perlembagaan negara.
Setelah lima puluh tahun lebih, di samping banyak kejayaan yang telah dicapai oleh semua kaum, banyak pula yang mula dipertikai, Dasar Ekonomi Baru khasnya. Orang Melayu tidak berpuas hati dengan kecapaian mereka; orang bukan-Melayu pun tidak berpuas hati dengan apa yang mereka peroleh berdasarkan kecapaian mereka. Ini menimbulkan kontradiksi antara kaum, yang mengakibatkan menebalnya rasa perkauman, dan melahirkan pertubuhan bukan-Kerajaan, seperti Perkasa dan lain-lain.
Kaum cendekiawan Melayu, khasnya, tidak berpuas hati dengan kecapain bahasa Melayu sebagai Bahasa Kebangsaan dan bahasa ilmu. Mereka mengkritik Kerajaan kerana tidak tegas mendaulatkan Bahasa Melayu sebagai bahasa rasmi negara, dan kerana mengajar ilmu Matematik dan ilmu Sains dalam bahasa Inggeris. Mereka bukan tidak sedar dan iktiraf bahasa Inggeris sebagai bahasa internasional dan bahasa ilmu yang penting. Mereka yakin tamadun bangsa mestilah diasaskan di atas bahasa kita sendiri.
Sejak Najib mengambil-alih pimpinan negara, beliau telah memperkenal dan melancarkan dasar-dasar transformasi dalam bidang-bidang ekonomi, Kerajaan, politik dan parti. Dalam keadaan krisis ekonomi dunia, dan tidak kurang keadaan kacau-bilau politik dunia dan dalam negeri, adakah beliau akan berjaya dalam pelbagai progrem transformasi ini? Saya harap beliau akan berjaya. Namun, banyak bergantung kepada pasukan kepimpinan beliau yang komited kepada tarnsformasi besar-besaran ini, serta pemantauan mereka pada setiap masa untuk membaiki proses transformasi ini.
Perlu diingat bahawa sistem dwi-parti (Kerajaan/Pembangkang) ini sistem yang berasal dari Barat. Barat telah menjajah negara-negara Dunia Ketiga selama beratus tahun. Malaysia satu daripada banyak negara yang telah mereka jajah. Dengan sendirinya, tidak semua benda yang boleh dan patut kita tiru daripada mereka. Kita harus belajar sains and teknologi mereka. Kita harus belajar pemodenan masyarakat daripada mereka. Dengan semangat ini, boleh dan patutkah kita ambil-alih sistem pemerintahan dwi-parti mereka bulat-bulat?
Ahli falsafah Inggeris Thomas Hobbes (m. 1679) medefinisikan masyarakat sebagai sebuah medan perang – “satu lawan semua”. Jelaslah kejiwaan ini merujuk kepada kejiwaan binatang. Manusia tidak harus kekal pada peringkat gasar primitif ini! Mereka harus cepat-cepat meningkat kepada kejiwaan yang lebih sesuai dengan taraf mereka sebagai khalifah Tuhan di Bumi.
Teori sanggah dan imbang (check and balance) ini berpunca dari falsafah politik Hobbes. Walaupun manusia muncul dari alam binatang, dia tidak perlu beku di tahap itu. Ia perlu berhijrah ke tahap kejiwaan yang lebih tinggi, mencipta sebuah masyarakat bukan sebagai medan perang “satu lawan semua”, tetapi masyarakat sebagai medan kerjasama “saling membantu satu sama lain” untuk kebaikan masyarakat itu.
Teori “sanggah dan imbang” mengandaikan kritikan hanya boleh dibuat dari luar. Ia mendakwa sebuah parti pembangkang perlu untuk mengkritik penyeleweng Kerajaan. Dakwaan ini tidak benar, kerana kritikan boleh dibuat dari dalam. Dari permulaan tamadun manusia, tesis bertembung dengan anti-tesis untuk melahirkan sintesis. Demikian tamadun manusia berkembang.
Tuhan memberikan manusia dua tangan supaya kedua-dua tangan itu boleh dimanfaatkan. Tidak wajar sama sekali kita gunakan sebelah tangan saja, apalgi dengan sebelah tangan merungkaikan kerja taangan yang satu lagi!
Lihatlah apa yang telah dicapai oleh sistem pemerintahan Barat itu. Bolehkah mereka memberi keadilan kepada rakyat mereka sendiri? Bolehkah mereka memberi keselamatan dan keadilan kepada dunia? Nyata mereka gagal. Jadi, apakah sebabnya kita harus meniru mereka?
Ini tidak bermakna saya menganjurkan pemerintahan autokratik. Pemerintahan mesti adil, mesti dilakukan melalui musyawarah, dan anggota-anggotanya mestilah terdiri dari orang-orang yang layak (layak dari segi kebolehan dan moralnya). Saya menganjurkan sebuah sistem pemerintahan yang lebih baik daripada sistem Westminster. Pemikir-pemikir politik kita metilah menyusun sebuah sistem pemerintahan yang lebih sesuai dengan cita-cita rakyat kita. Parti-parti politik, mewakili pelbagai jalur ideologi atau kaum, boleh wujud, tetapi mereka mestilah berpegang kepada sebuah falsafah politik nasional yang disusun bersama dan yang akan membolehkan semua parti bekerjasama untuk membangunkan tamadun bangsa kita.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
LUNG CANCER
What is The Causes of Lung Cancer
Lung cancer is the most common cause of death due to cancer in both men and women throughout the world. The American Cancer Society estimates that 219,440 new cases of lung cancer in the U.S. will be diagnosed and 159,390 deaths due to lung cancer will occur in 2009. According to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, approximately one out of every 14 men and women in the U.S. will be diagnosed with cancer of the lung at some point in their lifetime.
Lung cancer is predominantly a disease of the elderly; almost 70% of people diagnosed with lung cancer are over 65 years of age, while less than 3% of lung cancers occur in people under 45 years of age.
Lung cancer was not common prior to the 1930s but increased dramatically over the following decades as tobacco smoking increased. In many developing countries, the incidence of lung cancer is beginning to fall following public education about the dangers of cigarette smoking and the introduction of effective smoking-cessation programs.
Nevertheless, lung cancer remains among the most common types of cancers in both men and women worldwide. In the U.S., lung cancer has surpassed breast cancer as the most common cause of cancer-related deaths in women.
What Causes Lung Cancer?
Smoking
The incidence of lung cancer is strongly correlated with cigarette smoking, with about 90% of lung cancers arising as a result of tobacco use. The risk of lung cancer increases with the number of cigarettes smoked and the time over which smoking has occurred; doctors refer to this risk in terms of pack-years of smoking history (the number of packs of cigarettes smoked per day multiplied by the number of years smoked). For example, a person who has smoked two packs of cigarettes per day for 10 years has a 20 pack-year smoking history. While the risk of lung cancer is increased with even a 10-pack-year smoking history, those with 30-pack-year histories or more are considered to have the greatest risk for the development of lung cancer. Among those who smoke two or more packs of cigarettes per day, one in seven will die of lung cancer.
Pipe and cigar smoking also can cause lung cancer, although the risk is not as high as with cigarette smoking. Thus, while someone who smokes one pack of cigarettes per day has a risk for the development of lung cancer that is 25 times higher than a nonsmoker, pipe and cigar smokers have a risk of lung cancer that is about five times that of a nonsmoker.
Tobacco smoke contains over 4,000 chemical compounds, many of which have been shown to be cancer-causing or carcinogenic. The two primary carcinogens in tobacco smoke are chemicals known as nitrosamines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
The risk of developing lung cancer decreases each year following smoking cessation as normal cells grow and replace damaged cells in the lung. In former smokers, the risk of developing lung cancer begins to approach that of a nonsmoker about 15 years after cessation of smoking.
Passive smoking
Passive smoking or the inhalation of tobacco smoke by nonsmokers who share living or working quarters with smokers, also is an established risk factor for the development of lung cancer. Research has shown that nonsmokers who reside with a smoker have a 24% increase in risk for developing lung cancer when compared with nonsmokers who do not reside with a smoker. An estimated 3,000 lung cancer deaths that occur each year in the U.S. are attributable to passive smoking.
Asbestos Fibers
Asbestos fibers are silicate fibers that can persist for a lifetime in lung tissue following exposure to asbestos. The workplace is a common source of exposure to asbestos fibers, as asbestos was widely used in the past as both thermal and acoustic insulation. Today, asbestos use is limited or banned in many countries, including the U.S. Both lung cancer and mesothelioma (cancer of the pleura of the lung as well as of the lining of the abdominal cavity called the peritoneum) are associated with exposure to asbestos. Cigarette smoking drastically increases the chance of developing an asbestos-related lung cancer in workers exposed to asbestos. Asbestos workers who do not smoke have a fivefold greater risk of developing lung cancer than nonsmokers, but asbestos workers who smoke have a risk that is 50- to 90-fold greater than nonsmokers.
Radon Gas
Radon gas is a natural, chemically inert gas that is a natural decay product of uranium. Uranium decays to form products, including radon, that emit a type of ionizing radiation. Radon gas is a known cause of lung cancer, with an estimated 12% of lung-cancer deaths attributable to radon gas, or about 20,000 lung-cancer-related deaths annually in the U.S., making radon the second leading cause of lung cancer in the U.S. As with asbestos exposure, concomitant smoking greatly increases the risk of lung cancer with radon exposure. Radon gas can travel up through soil and enter homes through gaps in the foundation, pipes, drains, or other openings. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that one out of every 15 homes in the U.S. contains dangerous levels of radon gas. Radon gas is invisible and odorless, but it can be detected with simple test kits.
Familial Predisposition
While the majority of lung cancers are associated with tobacco smoking, the fact that not all smokers eventually develop lung cancer suggests that other factors, such as individual genetic susceptibility, may play a role in the causation of lung cancer. Numerous studies have shown that lung cancer is more likely to occur in both smoking and non-smoking relatives of those who have had lung cancer than in the general population. Recently, the largest genetic study of lung cancer ever conducted, involving over 10,000 people from 18 countries and led by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), identified a small region in the genome (DNA) that contains genes that appear to confer an increased susceptibility to lung cancer in smokers. The specific genes, located the q arm of chromosome 15, code for proteins that interact with nicotine and other tobacco toxins (nicotinic acetylcholine receptor genes).
Lung Diseases
The presence of certain diseases of the lung, notably chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), is associated with an increased risk (four- to sixfold the risk of a nonsmoker) for the development of lung cancer even after the effects of concomitant cigarette smoking are excluded.
Prior History of Lung Cancer
Survivors of lung cancer have a greater risk of developing a second lung cancer than the general population has of developing a first lung cancer. Survivors of non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLCs, see below) have an additive risk of 1%-2% per year for developing a second lung cancer. In survivors of small cell lung cancers (SCLCs, see below), the risk for development of second lung cancers approaches 6% per year.
Air pollution
Air pollution from vehicles, industry, and power plants can raise the likelihood of developing lung cancer in exposed individuals. Up to 1% of lung cancer deaths are attributable to breathing polluted air, and experts believe that prolonged exposure to highly polluted air can carry a risk for the development of lung cancer similar to that of passive smoking.
Lung cancer is the most common cause of death due to cancer in both men and women throughout the world. The American Cancer Society estimates that 219,440 new cases of lung cancer in the U.S. will be diagnosed and 159,390 deaths due to lung cancer will occur in 2009. According to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, approximately one out of every 14 men and women in the U.S. will be diagnosed with cancer of the lung at some point in their lifetime.
Lung cancer is predominantly a disease of the elderly; almost 70% of people diagnosed with lung cancer are over 65 years of age, while less than 3% of lung cancers occur in people under 45 years of age.
Lung cancer was not common prior to the 1930s but increased dramatically over the following decades as tobacco smoking increased. In many developing countries, the incidence of lung cancer is beginning to fall following public education about the dangers of cigarette smoking and the introduction of effective smoking-cessation programs.
Nevertheless, lung cancer remains among the most common types of cancers in both men and women worldwide. In the U.S., lung cancer has surpassed breast cancer as the most common cause of cancer-related deaths in women.
What Causes Lung Cancer?
Smoking
The incidence of lung cancer is strongly correlated with cigarette smoking, with about 90% of lung cancers arising as a result of tobacco use. The risk of lung cancer increases with the number of cigarettes smoked and the time over which smoking has occurred; doctors refer to this risk in terms of pack-years of smoking history (the number of packs of cigarettes smoked per day multiplied by the number of years smoked). For example, a person who has smoked two packs of cigarettes per day for 10 years has a 20 pack-year smoking history. While the risk of lung cancer is increased with even a 10-pack-year smoking history, those with 30-pack-year histories or more are considered to have the greatest risk for the development of lung cancer. Among those who smoke two or more packs of cigarettes per day, one in seven will die of lung cancer.
Pipe and cigar smoking also can cause lung cancer, although the risk is not as high as with cigarette smoking. Thus, while someone who smokes one pack of cigarettes per day has a risk for the development of lung cancer that is 25 times higher than a nonsmoker, pipe and cigar smokers have a risk of lung cancer that is about five times that of a nonsmoker.
Tobacco smoke contains over 4,000 chemical compounds, many of which have been shown to be cancer-causing or carcinogenic. The two primary carcinogens in tobacco smoke are chemicals known as nitrosamines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
The risk of developing lung cancer decreases each year following smoking cessation as normal cells grow and replace damaged cells in the lung. In former smokers, the risk of developing lung cancer begins to approach that of a nonsmoker about 15 years after cessation of smoking.
Passive smoking
Passive smoking or the inhalation of tobacco smoke by nonsmokers who share living or working quarters with smokers, also is an established risk factor for the development of lung cancer. Research has shown that nonsmokers who reside with a smoker have a 24% increase in risk for developing lung cancer when compared with nonsmokers who do not reside with a smoker. An estimated 3,000 lung cancer deaths that occur each year in the U.S. are attributable to passive smoking.
Asbestos Fibers
Asbestos fibers are silicate fibers that can persist for a lifetime in lung tissue following exposure to asbestos. The workplace is a common source of exposure to asbestos fibers, as asbestos was widely used in the past as both thermal and acoustic insulation. Today, asbestos use is limited or banned in many countries, including the U.S. Both lung cancer and mesothelioma (cancer of the pleura of the lung as well as of the lining of the abdominal cavity called the peritoneum) are associated with exposure to asbestos. Cigarette smoking drastically increases the chance of developing an asbestos-related lung cancer in workers exposed to asbestos. Asbestos workers who do not smoke have a fivefold greater risk of developing lung cancer than nonsmokers, but asbestos workers who smoke have a risk that is 50- to 90-fold greater than nonsmokers.
Radon Gas
Radon gas is a natural, chemically inert gas that is a natural decay product of uranium. Uranium decays to form products, including radon, that emit a type of ionizing radiation. Radon gas is a known cause of lung cancer, with an estimated 12% of lung-cancer deaths attributable to radon gas, or about 20,000 lung-cancer-related deaths annually in the U.S., making radon the second leading cause of lung cancer in the U.S. As with asbestos exposure, concomitant smoking greatly increases the risk of lung cancer with radon exposure. Radon gas can travel up through soil and enter homes through gaps in the foundation, pipes, drains, or other openings. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that one out of every 15 homes in the U.S. contains dangerous levels of radon gas. Radon gas is invisible and odorless, but it can be detected with simple test kits.
Familial Predisposition
While the majority of lung cancers are associated with tobacco smoking, the fact that not all smokers eventually develop lung cancer suggests that other factors, such as individual genetic susceptibility, may play a role in the causation of lung cancer. Numerous studies have shown that lung cancer is more likely to occur in both smoking and non-smoking relatives of those who have had lung cancer than in the general population. Recently, the largest genetic study of lung cancer ever conducted, involving over 10,000 people from 18 countries and led by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), identified a small region in the genome (DNA) that contains genes that appear to confer an increased susceptibility to lung cancer in smokers. The specific genes, located the q arm of chromosome 15, code for proteins that interact with nicotine and other tobacco toxins (nicotinic acetylcholine receptor genes).
Lung Diseases
The presence of certain diseases of the lung, notably chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), is associated with an increased risk (four- to sixfold the risk of a nonsmoker) for the development of lung cancer even after the effects of concomitant cigarette smoking are excluded.
Prior History of Lung Cancer
Survivors of lung cancer have a greater risk of developing a second lung cancer than the general population has of developing a first lung cancer. Survivors of non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLCs, see below) have an additive risk of 1%-2% per year for developing a second lung cancer. In survivors of small cell lung cancers (SCLCs, see below), the risk for development of second lung cancers approaches 6% per year.
Air pollution
Air pollution from vehicles, industry, and power plants can raise the likelihood of developing lung cancer in exposed individuals. Up to 1% of lung cancer deaths are attributable to breathing polluted air, and experts believe that prolonged exposure to highly polluted air can carry a risk for the development of lung cancer similar to that of passive smoking.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
sembang 6
kalau betul.....why not try?.....
Tolong baca sampai habis*.buah fikiran yg sangat baik*.mari kita renung
dan fikir fikirkan*kemudian kita lakukan.
Idea daripada orang-orang yang kerja kat PETRONAS - price control
Idea yang sangat menarik? Tapi adakah ianya berkesan?
> Nampaknya menjelang tahun depan harga petrol
> akan menghampiri RM 2.00. Mahu
> supaya harga petrol turun? Kita perlukan satu
> tindakan bijak dan bersepadu.
> Philip Hollsworth menawarkan idea bagus ini.
> Ianya LEBIH BERKESAN berbanding kempen
> "jangan beli petrol pada hari tertentu" yang
> dilakukan pada April atau Mei lalu. Syarikat
> minyak hanya akan mentertawakan seba b mereka
> tahu dengan tidak membeli petrol, kita akan
> menyusahkan diri sendiri. Ia lebih menyusahkan
> pengguna sendiri
> berbanding penjual.
> Tapi, tak kiralah dari siapa idea ini yang
> mencadangkan pelan yang benar-benar berkesan..
> Sila teruskan membaca dan ambillah bahagian
> dalam rancangan ini.
> Mengikut kenyataan dari negara-negara pengeluar
> minyak anggota OPEC harga seliter petrol adalah
> semurah 89 hingga 95 sen sahaja. Tetapi syarikat
> syarikat pembekal minyaklah yang mengaut
> keuntungan besar dari situasi sekarang ini.
> Kita sebagai pengguna perlukan tindakan agresif
> untuk 'mengajar' mereka bahawa PEMBELI juga
> ada kuasa untuk yang mengawal harga, bukan
> penjual sahaja.
> Dengan harga petrol yang naik begitu tinggi
> sekarang ini, kita pengguna perlu bertindak
> segera. Satu cara yang disarankan untuk
> menurunkan harga petrol ialah dengan
> memberikan tamparan 'market leader' industri
> berkenaan, iaitu dengan tidak
> membeli petrol dari penjual tertentu. Ini dapat kita
> lakukan tanpa menyusahkan diri kita sendiri.
Ideanya begini :-
Untuk sepanjang tahun ini, JANGAN beli petrol dari TIGA SYARIKAT
MINYAK
TERBESAR DIDUNIA iaitu
1) ESSO/MOBIL
2) SHELL
3) PROJET
Tiga syarikat gergasi inilah yang sebenarnya
> mengawal harga runcit petrol dan mengaut
> keuntungan untuk diri mereka sendiri. Sistem ini
> sejajar dengan cara business kapitalis Yahudi
> yang tidak langsung mempunyai perasaan
> bertimbang rasa sesama manusia.
> Jika mereka tidak merasa penjualan petrol mereka
> menurun secara tiba-tiba sedangkan pesaing
> mereka akan terus maju, mereka akan mula
> menurunkan harga. Dan jika mereka berbuat
> demikian yang lain akan turut serta. Tetapi, untuk
> kaedah ini memberi kesan, kita kena memberitahu
> berjuta pembeli ESSO/MOBIL,SHELL dan
> PROJET.
> Ia sangat mudah dilakukan. Saya akan terangkan
> disini caranya:-
> Saya menghantar mesej ini kepada ramai
> orang.Jika setiap kita menghantar kepada
> sekurang2nya 10 orang atau lebih (30 x 10 = 300)?
> Dan 300 orang ini hantar kepada sekurang2nya 10
> orang atau lebih (300 x 10 = 3,000)? dan
> seterusnya.
> Sebaik mesej ini sampai kepada generasi
> penerima yang ke 6, ia sebenarnya telah
> disebarkan kepada lebih TIGA JUTA pengguna
> petrol. Sekali lagi, apa yang perlu anda lakukan
> ialah :
1) Menghantar mesej ini kepada 10 orang atau lebih, itu saja.
2) Berhenti dengan serta merta membeli petrol dari ESSO/MOBIL, SHELL dan
PROJET.
Itu sahaja.....
Berapa lama ia akan berlaku? Jika setiap kita
> menghantar email kepada 10 orang dalam satu
> hari, semua 3 JUTA orang akan dapat dihubungi
> dalam masa 8 hari sahaja.
> Saya cabar anda, jangan sangka anda tiada
> kuasa, bertindak secara bersama.
> Ia pasti akan membuahkan hasil.
Jika anda terima sar ana n ini, sila sebarkan email ini.
TOLONG KEKALKAN KOMITMEN ANDA
SEHINGGA MEREKA TURUNKAN HARGA
DALAM LINGKUNGAN 80 SEN SELITER.
Mudah saja, anda cuma perlu....... .....
1. Forwardkan email ini kepada kawan-kawan dan kenalan,
2. Beli petrol dari PETRONAS , dan CALTEX sahaja ..... jauhi diri anda
dari stesyen petrol ESSO/MOBIL, SHELL dan PROJET
Tolong baca sampai habis*.buah fikiran yg sangat baik*.mari kita renung
dan fikir fikirkan*kemudian kita lakukan.
Idea daripada orang-orang yang kerja kat PETRONAS - price control
Idea yang sangat menarik? Tapi adakah ianya berkesan?
> Nampaknya menjelang tahun depan harga petrol
> akan menghampiri RM 2.00. Mahu
> supaya harga petrol turun? Kita perlukan satu
> tindakan bijak dan bersepadu.
> Philip Hollsworth menawarkan idea bagus ini.
> Ianya LEBIH BERKESAN berbanding kempen
> "jangan beli petrol pada hari tertentu" yang
> dilakukan pada April atau Mei lalu. Syarikat
> minyak hanya akan mentertawakan seba b mereka
> tahu dengan tidak membeli petrol, kita akan
> menyusahkan diri sendiri. Ia lebih menyusahkan
> pengguna sendiri
> berbanding penjual.
> Tapi, tak kiralah dari siapa idea ini yang
> mencadangkan pelan yang benar-benar berkesan..
> Sila teruskan membaca dan ambillah bahagian
> dalam rancangan ini.
> Mengikut kenyataan dari negara-negara pengeluar
> minyak anggota OPEC harga seliter petrol adalah
> semurah 89 hingga 95 sen sahaja. Tetapi syarikat
> syarikat pembekal minyaklah yang mengaut
> keuntungan besar dari situasi sekarang ini.
> Kita sebagai pengguna perlukan tindakan agresif
> untuk 'mengajar' mereka bahawa PEMBELI juga
> ada kuasa untuk yang mengawal harga, bukan
> penjual sahaja.
> Dengan harga petrol yang naik begitu tinggi
> sekarang ini, kita pengguna perlu bertindak
> segera. Satu cara yang disarankan untuk
> menurunkan harga petrol ialah dengan
> memberikan tamparan 'market leader' industri
> berkenaan, iaitu dengan tidak
> membeli petrol dari penjual tertentu. Ini dapat kita
> lakukan tanpa menyusahkan diri kita sendiri.
Ideanya begini :-
Untuk sepanjang tahun ini, JANGAN beli petrol dari TIGA SYARIKAT
MINYAK
TERBESAR DIDUNIA iaitu
1) ESSO/MOBIL
2) SHELL
3) PROJET
Tiga syarikat gergasi inilah yang sebenarnya
> mengawal harga runcit petrol dan mengaut
> keuntungan untuk diri mereka sendiri. Sistem ini
> sejajar dengan cara business kapitalis Yahudi
> yang tidak langsung mempunyai perasaan
> bertimbang rasa sesama manusia.
> Jika mereka tidak merasa penjualan petrol mereka
> menurun secara tiba-tiba sedangkan pesaing
> mereka akan terus maju, mereka akan mula
> menurunkan harga. Dan jika mereka berbuat
> demikian yang lain akan turut serta. Tetapi, untuk
> kaedah ini memberi kesan, kita kena memberitahu
> berjuta pembeli ESSO/MOBIL,SHELL dan
> PROJET.
> Ia sangat mudah dilakukan. Saya akan terangkan
> disini caranya:-
> Saya menghantar mesej ini kepada ramai
> orang.Jika setiap kita menghantar kepada
> sekurang2nya 10 orang atau lebih (30 x 10 = 300)?
> Dan 300 orang ini hantar kepada sekurang2nya 10
> orang atau lebih (300 x 10 = 3,000)? dan
> seterusnya.
> Sebaik mesej ini sampai kepada generasi
> penerima yang ke 6, ia sebenarnya telah
> disebarkan kepada lebih TIGA JUTA pengguna
> petrol. Sekali lagi, apa yang perlu anda lakukan
> ialah :
1) Menghantar mesej ini kepada 10 orang atau lebih, itu saja.
2) Berhenti dengan serta merta membeli petrol dari ESSO/MOBIL, SHELL dan
PROJET.
Itu sahaja.....
Berapa lama ia akan berlaku? Jika setiap kita
> menghantar email kepada 10 orang dalam satu
> hari, semua 3 JUTA orang akan dapat dihubungi
> dalam masa 8 hari sahaja.
> Saya cabar anda, jangan sangka anda tiada
> kuasa, bertindak secara bersama.
> Ia pasti akan membuahkan hasil.
Jika anda terima sar ana n ini, sila sebarkan email ini.
TOLONG KEKALKAN KOMITMEN ANDA
SEHINGGA MEREKA TURUNKAN HARGA
DALAM LINGKUNGAN 80 SEN SELITER.
Mudah saja, anda cuma perlu....... .....
1. Forwardkan email ini kepada kawan-kawan dan kenalan,
2. Beli petrol dari PETRONAS , dan CALTEX sahaja ..... jauhi diri anda
dari stesyen petrol ESSO/MOBIL, SHELL dan PROJET
Friday, September 10, 2010
war on drug
Our 'war on drugs' has been an abysmal failure. Just look at Mexico
The west's refusal to countenance drug legalisation has fuelled anarchy, profiteering and misery
By Simon Jenkins
September 10, 2010 "The Guardian" -- It is wrecking the government of Mexico. It is financing the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is throwing 11,000 Britons into jail. It is corrupting democracy throughout Latin America. It is devastating the ghettoes of America and propagating Aids in urban Europe. Its turnover is some £200bn a year, on which it pays not a penny of tax. Thousands round the world die of it and millions are impoverished. It is the biggest man-made blight on the face of the earth.
No, it is not drugs. They are as old as humanity. Drugs will always be a challenge to individual and communal discipline, alongside alcohol and nicotine. The curse is different: the declaration by states that some drugs are illegal and that those who supply and use them are criminals. This is the root of the evil.
By outlawing products – poppy and coca – that are in massive global demand, governments merely hand huge untaxed profits to those outside the law and propagate anarchy. Repressive regimes, such as some Muslim ones, have managed to curb domestic alcohol consumption, but no one has been able to stop the global market in heroin and cocaine. It is too big and too lucrative, rivalling arms and oil on the international monetary exchanges. Forty years of "the war on drugs" have defeated all-comers, except political hypocrites.
Most western governments have turned a blind eye and decided to ride with the menace, since the chief price of their failure is paid by the poor. In Britain Tony Blair, Jack Straw and Gordon Brown felt tackling the drugs economy was not worth antagonising rightwing newspapers. Like most rich westerners they relied on regarding drugs as a menace among the poor but a youthful indiscretion among their own offspring.
The full horror of drug criminality is now coming home to roost far from the streets of New York and London. In countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, drugs are so endemic that criminalising them merely fuels a colossal corruption. It is rendering futile Nato's Afghan war effort, which requires the retraining of an army and police too addicted either to cure or to sack. Poppies are the chief source of cash for farmers whose hearts and minds Nato needs to win, yet whose poppy crop (ultimately for Nato nations) finances the Taliban. It is crazy.
The worst impact of criminalisation is on Latin America. Here the slow emergence of democratic governments – from Bolivia through Peru and Columbia to Mexico – is being jeopardised by America's "counter-narcotics" diplomacy through the US Drug Enforcement Agency. Rather than try to stem its own voracious appetite for drugs, rich America shifts guilt on to poor supplier countries. Never was the law of economics – demand always evokes supply – so traduced as in Washington's drugs policy. America spends $40bn a year on narcotics policy, imprisoning a staggering 1.5m of its citizens under it.
Cocaine supplies routed through Mexico have made that country the drugs equivalent of a Gulf oil state. An estimated 500,000 people are employed in the trade, all at risk of their lives, with 45,000 soldiers deployed against them. Border provinces are largely in the hands of drug barons and their private armies. In the past four years 28,000 Mexicans have died in drug wars, a slaughter that would outrage the world if caused by any other industry (such as oil). Mexico's experience puts in the shade the gangsterism of America's last failed experiment in prohibition, the prewar alcohol ban.
As a result, it is South American governments and not the sophisticated west that are now pleading for reform. A year ago an Argentinian court gave American and British politicians a lesson in libertarianism by declaring that "adults should be free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state". Mexico declared drugs users "patients not criminals". Ecuador released 1,500 hapless women imprisoned as drug mules – while the British government locks them for years in Holloway.
Brazil's ex-president Fernando Cardoso and a panel of his former judges announced emphatically that the war on drugs had failed and that "the only way to reduce violence in Mexico, Brazil or anywhere else is to legalise the production, supply and consumption of all drugs". Last month, Mexico's desperate president, Felipe Calderón, acknowledged that his four-year, US-financed war on the drug cartels had all but failed and called on the world for "a fundamental debate on the legalising of drugs".
The difficulty these countries face is the size of the global industry created by the west to meet its demand for drugs. That industry is certain to deploy lethal means against legalisation, as the alcohol barons did against the ending of prohibition. They have been unwittingly sponsored for decades by western leaders, and particularly by the United Nations which, with typical fatuity, declared in 1998 that it would "create a drug-free world" by 2008. All maintained the fiction that demand could be curbed by curbing supply, thus presenting their own consumers as somehow the victims of supplier countries.
The UN's prohibitionist drugs czar, Antonio Maria Costa, comfortably ensconced in Vienna, holds that cannabis is as harmful as heroin and cocaine, and wants to deny individual governments freedom over their drug policies. In eight years in office he has disastrously protected the drug cartels and their profits by refusing to countenance drug legalisation. He even suggested recently that the estimated $352bn generated by drug lords in 2008-09 helped save the world banking system from collapse. It is hard to know whose side he is on.
The evil of drugs will never be stamped out by seizing trivial quantities of drugs and arresting trivial numbers of traders and consumers. That is a mere pretence of action. Drug law enforcement has been the greatest regulatory failure in modern times, far greater in its impact on the world than that of banking. Nor is much likely to come from moves in both Europe and America to legalise cannabis use, sensible though they are. In November Californians are to vote on Proposition 19, to give municipalities freedom to legalise and tax cannabis. One farm in Oakland is forecast to yield $3m a year in taxes, money California's government sorely needs.
This will do nothing to combat the misery now being visited on Mexico. The world has to bring its biggest illegal trade under control. It has to legalise not just consumption but supply. There is evidence that drug markets respond to realistic regulation. In Britain, under Labour, nicotine use fell because tobacco was controlled and taxed, while alcohol use rose because it was decontrolled and made cheaper. European states that have decriminalised and regulated sections of their drug economies, such as the Netherlands, Switzerland and Portugal, have found it has reduced consumption. Regulation works, anarchy does not.
In the case of drugs produced in industrial quantities from distant corners of the globe, only international action has any hope of success. Drug supply must be legalised, taxed and controlled. Other than eliminating war, there can be no greater ambition for international statesmanship. The boon to the peoples of the world would be beyond price.
The west's refusal to countenance drug legalisation has fuelled anarchy, profiteering and misery
By Simon Jenkins
September 10, 2010 "The Guardian" -- It is wrecking the government of Mexico. It is financing the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is throwing 11,000 Britons into jail. It is corrupting democracy throughout Latin America. It is devastating the ghettoes of America and propagating Aids in urban Europe. Its turnover is some £200bn a year, on which it pays not a penny of tax. Thousands round the world die of it and millions are impoverished. It is the biggest man-made blight on the face of the earth.
No, it is not drugs. They are as old as humanity. Drugs will always be a challenge to individual and communal discipline, alongside alcohol and nicotine. The curse is different: the declaration by states that some drugs are illegal and that those who supply and use them are criminals. This is the root of the evil.
By outlawing products – poppy and coca – that are in massive global demand, governments merely hand huge untaxed profits to those outside the law and propagate anarchy. Repressive regimes, such as some Muslim ones, have managed to curb domestic alcohol consumption, but no one has been able to stop the global market in heroin and cocaine. It is too big and too lucrative, rivalling arms and oil on the international monetary exchanges. Forty years of "the war on drugs" have defeated all-comers, except political hypocrites.
Most western governments have turned a blind eye and decided to ride with the menace, since the chief price of their failure is paid by the poor. In Britain Tony Blair, Jack Straw and Gordon Brown felt tackling the drugs economy was not worth antagonising rightwing newspapers. Like most rich westerners they relied on regarding drugs as a menace among the poor but a youthful indiscretion among their own offspring.
The full horror of drug criminality is now coming home to roost far from the streets of New York and London. In countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, drugs are so endemic that criminalising them merely fuels a colossal corruption. It is rendering futile Nato's Afghan war effort, which requires the retraining of an army and police too addicted either to cure or to sack. Poppies are the chief source of cash for farmers whose hearts and minds Nato needs to win, yet whose poppy crop (ultimately for Nato nations) finances the Taliban. It is crazy.
The worst impact of criminalisation is on Latin America. Here the slow emergence of democratic governments – from Bolivia through Peru and Columbia to Mexico – is being jeopardised by America's "counter-narcotics" diplomacy through the US Drug Enforcement Agency. Rather than try to stem its own voracious appetite for drugs, rich America shifts guilt on to poor supplier countries. Never was the law of economics – demand always evokes supply – so traduced as in Washington's drugs policy. America spends $40bn a year on narcotics policy, imprisoning a staggering 1.5m of its citizens under it.
Cocaine supplies routed through Mexico have made that country the drugs equivalent of a Gulf oil state. An estimated 500,000 people are employed in the trade, all at risk of their lives, with 45,000 soldiers deployed against them. Border provinces are largely in the hands of drug barons and their private armies. In the past four years 28,000 Mexicans have died in drug wars, a slaughter that would outrage the world if caused by any other industry (such as oil). Mexico's experience puts in the shade the gangsterism of America's last failed experiment in prohibition, the prewar alcohol ban.
As a result, it is South American governments and not the sophisticated west that are now pleading for reform. A year ago an Argentinian court gave American and British politicians a lesson in libertarianism by declaring that "adults should be free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state". Mexico declared drugs users "patients not criminals". Ecuador released 1,500 hapless women imprisoned as drug mules – while the British government locks them for years in Holloway.
Brazil's ex-president Fernando Cardoso and a panel of his former judges announced emphatically that the war on drugs had failed and that "the only way to reduce violence in Mexico, Brazil or anywhere else is to legalise the production, supply and consumption of all drugs". Last month, Mexico's desperate president, Felipe Calderón, acknowledged that his four-year, US-financed war on the drug cartels had all but failed and called on the world for "a fundamental debate on the legalising of drugs".
The difficulty these countries face is the size of the global industry created by the west to meet its demand for drugs. That industry is certain to deploy lethal means against legalisation, as the alcohol barons did against the ending of prohibition. They have been unwittingly sponsored for decades by western leaders, and particularly by the United Nations which, with typical fatuity, declared in 1998 that it would "create a drug-free world" by 2008. All maintained the fiction that demand could be curbed by curbing supply, thus presenting their own consumers as somehow the victims of supplier countries.
The UN's prohibitionist drugs czar, Antonio Maria Costa, comfortably ensconced in Vienna, holds that cannabis is as harmful as heroin and cocaine, and wants to deny individual governments freedom over their drug policies. In eight years in office he has disastrously protected the drug cartels and their profits by refusing to countenance drug legalisation. He even suggested recently that the estimated $352bn generated by drug lords in 2008-09 helped save the world banking system from collapse. It is hard to know whose side he is on.
The evil of drugs will never be stamped out by seizing trivial quantities of drugs and arresting trivial numbers of traders and consumers. That is a mere pretence of action. Drug law enforcement has been the greatest regulatory failure in modern times, far greater in its impact on the world than that of banking. Nor is much likely to come from moves in both Europe and America to legalise cannabis use, sensible though they are. In November Californians are to vote on Proposition 19, to give municipalities freedom to legalise and tax cannabis. One farm in Oakland is forecast to yield $3m a year in taxes, money California's government sorely needs.
This will do nothing to combat the misery now being visited on Mexico. The world has to bring its biggest illegal trade under control. It has to legalise not just consumption but supply. There is evidence that drug markets respond to realistic regulation. In Britain, under Labour, nicotine use fell because tobacco was controlled and taxed, while alcohol use rose because it was decontrolled and made cheaper. European states that have decriminalised and regulated sections of their drug economies, such as the Netherlands, Switzerland and Portugal, have found it has reduced consumption. Regulation works, anarchy does not.
In the case of drugs produced in industrial quantities from distant corners of the globe, only international action has any hope of success. Drug supply must be legalised, taxed and controlled. Other than eliminating war, there can be no greater ambition for international statesmanship. The boon to the peoples of the world would be beyond price.
The ‘Meaning’ of 9/11
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The ‘Meaning’ of 9/11
It’s not what you think
By Justin Raimondo
September 10, 2010 "Antiwar" - - One would think that after nine years at least some of the anger, the horror and shock of the 9/11 terrorist attacks would have dissipated: but no. A glimpse at the headlines, a few days before the somber anniversary, disabuses us of this hopeful notion: a crazed pastor out in the boonies somewhere is burning Korans, and the commander of our forces in Afghanistan feels compelled to respond, as does the President. The proposal to build a Muslim community center blocks from "ground zero" – modeled on Jewish community centers ubiquitous in New York – is met with furious opposition, and the "anti-Islamization" movement spearheaded by bigots takes off, with mosques all over the country under attack. Physical attacks on Muslims, or people perceived as Muslim, escalate: a New York City cabbie is assaulted by a crazed Islamophobe, and people who have lived in this country for the whole of their lives are afraid.
What’s going on? Andrew Sullivan, writing on his popular blog, writes he is "at a loss to understand why so many have reacted so ferociously to this project." After all, Imam Feisel Rauf, the Muslim cleric who wants to build Cordoba House, is a moderate who has condemned Islamic extremism: Rauf was sent by the Bush administration overseas to act as an ambassador of good will to Muslim countries. So where is the ferocity coming from?
To find the answer to this question, we just have to follow the money, and thankfully Ken Vogel and Giovanni Russonello over at Politico have done just that. After detailing the money coming into the Cordoba House project from mainstream donors like the Rockefellers, they write:
"There’s also big money behind the mosque opposition, as highlighted by the relationship between [David] Horowitz’s Los Angeles-based nonprofit, Jihad Watch – the website run by Spencer "dedicated to bringing public attention to the role that jihad theology and ideology play in the modern world" – and Joyce Chernick, the wife of a wealthy California tech company founder.
"Though it was not listed on the public tax reports filed by Horowitz’s Freedom Center, Politico has confirmed that the lion’s share of the $920,000 it provided over the past three years to Jihad Watch came from Chernick, whose husband, Aubrey Chernick, has a net worth of $750 million, as a result of his 2004 sale to IBM of a software company he created, and a security consulting firm he now owns.
"A onetime trustee of the …Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Aubrey Chernick led the effort to pull together $3.5 million in venture capital to start Pajamas Media, a conservative blog network …
"The David Horowitz Freedom Center had a budget of $4.5 million last year, according to its tax filings, of which $290,000 came from the conservative Bradley Foundation, which also gave $75,000 to the Center for Security Policy last year. Horowitz has received an average of $461,000 a year in salary and benefits over the past three years, while Spencer has pulled in an average of $140,000, according to the center’s IRS filings."
Laura Rozen follows up on her Politico blog, detailing the trail of donations from 2008 990 filings for Chernick’s charitable foundation, the Fairbrook Foundation, listing all the familiar suspects – CAMERA, Horowitz, MEMRI, Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, the Israeli nationalist "Stand With Us" campus project – and a few less familiar, such as the American Friends of Ateret Cohanim, dedicated to thwarting our stated policy of no more settlements where it counts: in East Jerusalem.
Millions pour into the coffers of these groups, all of which are dedicated to one overriding principle, one goal: advancing Israel’s national interests in the US. The serpentine convolutions of the Chernick connection, linking one front group to another, encircle the political and temperamental spectrum, ranging from the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles (over $900k) to the many hundreds of thousands given to hardline neoconservative outfits like the Hudson Institute, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, not to mention Pajamas Media ($7 million, in collusion with venture capitalist James "extensively experienced in multimillion-dollar technology transfer and license agreements " Koshland) and a mass campaign to distribute DVDs of the virulently anti-Muslim film "Obsession."
The aim of all this giving is to create and sustain an obsessive hatred of Muslims, all Muslims, and garner support for Israel. The fulminations of Newt Gingrich and the flaxwn-haired harpies of Fox News, who rail against the "ground zero mosque" seem, on the surface, to make no sense. Are they really saying that they want the US to declare war on the billion-plus Muslims who inhabit the planet earth? This, after all, is precisely what Osama bin Laden has repeatedly said: that all the world’s Muslims must unite under al-Qaeda’s bloody banner because the West, in alliance with Israel, is out to destroy Islam, and it is therefore the duty of the faithful to wage jihad against the US.
The Israelis, having long ago declared war on all the other nations of the region, want us in their camp, and that is precisely what occurred with stunning speed before the smoke cleared from the site where the World Trade Center once stood. "We’re all Israelis now!" exulted Martin "Palestinians are subhuman" Peretz, over at The New Republic. Benjamin Netanyahu, who is today the Prime Minister of Israel, told an audience at Bar Ilan University “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq,” according to the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv. The attack, he averred, “swung American public opinion in our favor” – and now that he and his fellow extremists are in power in Tel Aviv, they are making sure public opinion stays in their favor.
The craziness that ensued in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks had to be sustained if Israel was to take full advantage of the moment – a moment their intelligence operatives anticipated, according to Fox News, in a four-part series by their topnotch journalist Carl Cameron, which started out as follows:
"Since September 11, more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new patriot anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations. A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States.
"There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are “tie-ins.” But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, ‘evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.’"
Fox News has never retracted a word of this story, although they did – after pressure from the Israel lobby – delete it from their web site. It was never mentioned again, at least in "respectable" quarters, and, to be sure, it was never forgotten, thanks to the Internet, where Carl Cameron will be exposing the Israeli connection to the 9/11 terrorist attacks unto eternity.
Cameron’s noting that "more than sixty" Israelis had been arrested immediately after 9/11, along with and under the same legal rubric as thousands of Arabs, had also been noted here in this space, before the Fox News broadcasts. Why, I asked in a column, was the US government rounding up Israelis, of all people – unless there was some kind of Israeli connection to the attacks? The answer came in Cameron’s reporting, and subsequent stories in the "mainstream" media: the Israelis, whose intelligence services had been very active on our soil in the months leading up to 9/11, had been following the hijackers, shadowing their every move, without telling us – almost as if they were protecting them rather than trying to stop them.
What happened on September 11, 2001, has changed the shape of history, and certainly determined the utterly disastrous course of US foreign policy since that day. We have launched a war of retribution against the entire Muslim world, a vast campaign of bombings, drone attacks, occupation, and terror unleashed on the peoples of the Middle East, from Iraq to Pakistan. This is precisely why the Israelis didn’t tell us what Mohammed Atta and his co-conspirators were up to, although – if we take Fox News seriously, and I realize there are plenty who don’t – there is no doubt that they had it in their power to stop the whole operation before the hijackers had a chance to strike. All they had to do was tell us – and they didn’t. This is the "intelligence failure" – not the lack of centralized information, not the competition between the CIA and the FBI – that made the 9/11 terrorist attacks possible: the perfidy of our Israeli "ally."
The Israelis didn’t dive-bomb the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with commandeered airliners: Atta and his gang did. Yet they could have prevented it – but why should they have? After all, the attacks have swung public opinion in their favor, as Netanyahu boasted – surely a foreseeable development.
Today, nine years after the event, the Israel lobby is using the anniversary of the attacks to whip up anti-Muslim hysteria to a fever pitch, and they have plenty of bucks to do it. These people – who, as Juan Cole points out, represent a minuscule fraction of the pro-Israel population in the US, and stand out like a couple of sore thumbs from the overwhelmingly liberal Jewish community – mean business, and there’s only one way to fight them. It’s time to play hardball – just like they do.
I was warned, before raising the possibility of an Israeli connection to 9/11, that I was touching a live wire, that my career – such as it is – would be destroyed, and that I would be banished to the hinterlands, where various obsessives trade conspiracy theories and argue over whether it’s the Bilderbergers or the Illuminati who control the world.
It hasn’t happened, but I wouldn’t care if it did. As Ayn Rand once said: I’m not brave enough to be a coward – I see the consequences too clearly. We see the consequences of 9/11 all around us, in the hate-wrinkled face of the Koran-burning preacher, in the shrill shrieking of Pamela Geller whose anti-Muslim rallies in the vanished shadow of the Trade Towers are as ugly as she is: we see it in the faces of Pakistani refugees, huddled in disease-infested camps, as they flee the US invasion of death-dealing drones.
Think about it: the leadership of a nation that betrayed us, that watched, impassively – or, perhaps, gleefully – as Islamist terrorists wreaked deadly havoc on our two biggest cities, has a vast and well-funded propaganda network in this country dedicated to stoking hatred of Muslims. And they are certainly doing a very good job of it.
How do they get away with it?
So, you want to know the "meaning" of 9/11? It is, as Martin Luther King put it, this:
"In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
I’m taking my show on the road this autumn, to campuses around the country, talking about some of the ideas expressed in Wednesday’s column on "Anti-Interventionism: The Left-wing Tradition." My talk is entitled "Why Has the Left Sold Out the Antiwar Movement?" – which is sure to provoke a controversy, or at least that’s the hope.
The libertarian student movement, organizing nationally under the leadership of Young Americans for Liberty, is the most exciting – and important – development since the birth of contemporary libertarianism itself. Murray Rothbard, who founded the modern libertarian movement in his living room (and, back then, believe me, it was just big enough to fit in his modest-sized living room), would be thrilled if he were alive today. That’s because they’re hard core, and hard workers, busy building a burgeoning organization dedicated to ending the Fed and ending the wars the Fed makes possible. Who would’ve thought?! That’s one reason I’m taking this tour, but another is to engage in dialogue with the left: to wake them up to the fact that a united antiwar movement, organized around the single issue of US military intervention overseas, is a moral imperative.
If you’re interested in booking me at your campus, write wendy@antiwar.com, or call the Antiwar.com office, at: 510-217-8665.
Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (ISI, 2008), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).
He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
The ‘Meaning’ of 9/11
It’s not what you think
By Justin Raimondo
September 10, 2010 "Antiwar" - - One would think that after nine years at least some of the anger, the horror and shock of the 9/11 terrorist attacks would have dissipated: but no. A glimpse at the headlines, a few days before the somber anniversary, disabuses us of this hopeful notion: a crazed pastor out in the boonies somewhere is burning Korans, and the commander of our forces in Afghanistan feels compelled to respond, as does the President. The proposal to build a Muslim community center blocks from "ground zero" – modeled on Jewish community centers ubiquitous in New York – is met with furious opposition, and the "anti-Islamization" movement spearheaded by bigots takes off, with mosques all over the country under attack. Physical attacks on Muslims, or people perceived as Muslim, escalate: a New York City cabbie is assaulted by a crazed Islamophobe, and people who have lived in this country for the whole of their lives are afraid.
What’s going on? Andrew Sullivan, writing on his popular blog, writes he is "at a loss to understand why so many have reacted so ferociously to this project." After all, Imam Feisel Rauf, the Muslim cleric who wants to build Cordoba House, is a moderate who has condemned Islamic extremism: Rauf was sent by the Bush administration overseas to act as an ambassador of good will to Muslim countries. So where is the ferocity coming from?
To find the answer to this question, we just have to follow the money, and thankfully Ken Vogel and Giovanni Russonello over at Politico have done just that. After detailing the money coming into the Cordoba House project from mainstream donors like the Rockefellers, they write:
"There’s also big money behind the mosque opposition, as highlighted by the relationship between [David] Horowitz’s Los Angeles-based nonprofit, Jihad Watch – the website run by Spencer "dedicated to bringing public attention to the role that jihad theology and ideology play in the modern world" – and Joyce Chernick, the wife of a wealthy California tech company founder.
"Though it was not listed on the public tax reports filed by Horowitz’s Freedom Center, Politico has confirmed that the lion’s share of the $920,000 it provided over the past three years to Jihad Watch came from Chernick, whose husband, Aubrey Chernick, has a net worth of $750 million, as a result of his 2004 sale to IBM of a software company he created, and a security consulting firm he now owns.
"A onetime trustee of the …Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Aubrey Chernick led the effort to pull together $3.5 million in venture capital to start Pajamas Media, a conservative blog network …
"The David Horowitz Freedom Center had a budget of $4.5 million last year, according to its tax filings, of which $290,000 came from the conservative Bradley Foundation, which also gave $75,000 to the Center for Security Policy last year. Horowitz has received an average of $461,000 a year in salary and benefits over the past three years, while Spencer has pulled in an average of $140,000, according to the center’s IRS filings."
Laura Rozen follows up on her Politico blog, detailing the trail of donations from 2008 990 filings for Chernick’s charitable foundation, the Fairbrook Foundation, listing all the familiar suspects – CAMERA, Horowitz, MEMRI, Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, the Israeli nationalist "Stand With Us" campus project – and a few less familiar, such as the American Friends of Ateret Cohanim, dedicated to thwarting our stated policy of no more settlements where it counts: in East Jerusalem.
Millions pour into the coffers of these groups, all of which are dedicated to one overriding principle, one goal: advancing Israel’s national interests in the US. The serpentine convolutions of the Chernick connection, linking one front group to another, encircle the political and temperamental spectrum, ranging from the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles (over $900k) to the many hundreds of thousands given to hardline neoconservative outfits like the Hudson Institute, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, not to mention Pajamas Media ($7 million, in collusion with venture capitalist James "extensively experienced in multimillion-dollar technology transfer and license agreements " Koshland) and a mass campaign to distribute DVDs of the virulently anti-Muslim film "Obsession."
The aim of all this giving is to create and sustain an obsessive hatred of Muslims, all Muslims, and garner support for Israel. The fulminations of Newt Gingrich and the flaxwn-haired harpies of Fox News, who rail against the "ground zero mosque" seem, on the surface, to make no sense. Are they really saying that they want the US to declare war on the billion-plus Muslims who inhabit the planet earth? This, after all, is precisely what Osama bin Laden has repeatedly said: that all the world’s Muslims must unite under al-Qaeda’s bloody banner because the West, in alliance with Israel, is out to destroy Islam, and it is therefore the duty of the faithful to wage jihad against the US.
The Israelis, having long ago declared war on all the other nations of the region, want us in their camp, and that is precisely what occurred with stunning speed before the smoke cleared from the site where the World Trade Center once stood. "We’re all Israelis now!" exulted Martin "Palestinians are subhuman" Peretz, over at The New Republic. Benjamin Netanyahu, who is today the Prime Minister of Israel, told an audience at Bar Ilan University “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq,” according to the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv. The attack, he averred, “swung American public opinion in our favor” – and now that he and his fellow extremists are in power in Tel Aviv, they are making sure public opinion stays in their favor.
The craziness that ensued in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks had to be sustained if Israel was to take full advantage of the moment – a moment their intelligence operatives anticipated, according to Fox News, in a four-part series by their topnotch journalist Carl Cameron, which started out as follows:
"Since September 11, more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new patriot anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations. A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States.
"There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are “tie-ins.” But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, ‘evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.’"
Fox News has never retracted a word of this story, although they did – after pressure from the Israel lobby – delete it from their web site. It was never mentioned again, at least in "respectable" quarters, and, to be sure, it was never forgotten, thanks to the Internet, where Carl Cameron will be exposing the Israeli connection to the 9/11 terrorist attacks unto eternity.
Cameron’s noting that "more than sixty" Israelis had been arrested immediately after 9/11, along with and under the same legal rubric as thousands of Arabs, had also been noted here in this space, before the Fox News broadcasts. Why, I asked in a column, was the US government rounding up Israelis, of all people – unless there was some kind of Israeli connection to the attacks? The answer came in Cameron’s reporting, and subsequent stories in the "mainstream" media: the Israelis, whose intelligence services had been very active on our soil in the months leading up to 9/11, had been following the hijackers, shadowing their every move, without telling us – almost as if they were protecting them rather than trying to stop them.
What happened on September 11, 2001, has changed the shape of history, and certainly determined the utterly disastrous course of US foreign policy since that day. We have launched a war of retribution against the entire Muslim world, a vast campaign of bombings, drone attacks, occupation, and terror unleashed on the peoples of the Middle East, from Iraq to Pakistan. This is precisely why the Israelis didn’t tell us what Mohammed Atta and his co-conspirators were up to, although – if we take Fox News seriously, and I realize there are plenty who don’t – there is no doubt that they had it in their power to stop the whole operation before the hijackers had a chance to strike. All they had to do was tell us – and they didn’t. This is the "intelligence failure" – not the lack of centralized information, not the competition between the CIA and the FBI – that made the 9/11 terrorist attacks possible: the perfidy of our Israeli "ally."
The Israelis didn’t dive-bomb the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with commandeered airliners: Atta and his gang did. Yet they could have prevented it – but why should they have? After all, the attacks have swung public opinion in their favor, as Netanyahu boasted – surely a foreseeable development.
Today, nine years after the event, the Israel lobby is using the anniversary of the attacks to whip up anti-Muslim hysteria to a fever pitch, and they have plenty of bucks to do it. These people – who, as Juan Cole points out, represent a minuscule fraction of the pro-Israel population in the US, and stand out like a couple of sore thumbs from the overwhelmingly liberal Jewish community – mean business, and there’s only one way to fight them. It’s time to play hardball – just like they do.
I was warned, before raising the possibility of an Israeli connection to 9/11, that I was touching a live wire, that my career – such as it is – would be destroyed, and that I would be banished to the hinterlands, where various obsessives trade conspiracy theories and argue over whether it’s the Bilderbergers or the Illuminati who control the world.
It hasn’t happened, but I wouldn’t care if it did. As Ayn Rand once said: I’m not brave enough to be a coward – I see the consequences too clearly. We see the consequences of 9/11 all around us, in the hate-wrinkled face of the Koran-burning preacher, in the shrill shrieking of Pamela Geller whose anti-Muslim rallies in the vanished shadow of the Trade Towers are as ugly as she is: we see it in the faces of Pakistani refugees, huddled in disease-infested camps, as they flee the US invasion of death-dealing drones.
Think about it: the leadership of a nation that betrayed us, that watched, impassively – or, perhaps, gleefully – as Islamist terrorists wreaked deadly havoc on our two biggest cities, has a vast and well-funded propaganda network in this country dedicated to stoking hatred of Muslims. And they are certainly doing a very good job of it.
How do they get away with it?
So, you want to know the "meaning" of 9/11? It is, as Martin Luther King put it, this:
"In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
I’m taking my show on the road this autumn, to campuses around the country, talking about some of the ideas expressed in Wednesday’s column on "Anti-Interventionism: The Left-wing Tradition." My talk is entitled "Why Has the Left Sold Out the Antiwar Movement?" – which is sure to provoke a controversy, or at least that’s the hope.
The libertarian student movement, organizing nationally under the leadership of Young Americans for Liberty, is the most exciting – and important – development since the birth of contemporary libertarianism itself. Murray Rothbard, who founded the modern libertarian movement in his living room (and, back then, believe me, it was just big enough to fit in his modest-sized living room), would be thrilled if he were alive today. That’s because they’re hard core, and hard workers, busy building a burgeoning organization dedicated to ending the Fed and ending the wars the Fed makes possible. Who would’ve thought?! That’s one reason I’m taking this tour, but another is to engage in dialogue with the left: to wake them up to the fact that a united antiwar movement, organized around the single issue of US military intervention overseas, is a moral imperative.
If you’re interested in booking me at your campus, write wendy@antiwar.com, or call the Antiwar.com office, at: 510-217-8665.
Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (ISI, 2008), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).
He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
SEMBANG 5
Dulu
- Sewaktu aku mula nak belajar kenal abjad dan angka, ibu ayah, abang kakak, pakcik, makcik, cikgu-cikgu, ustaz-ustaz dan tok-tok guruku menasihatkanku "Sekolah dan belajar rajin-rajin, jadi pandai sampai dapat masuk universiti. Nanti senang dapat kerja-dapat gaji. Dapat duit, dapat beli kereta, dapat beli rumah, dapat beli tanah. Ada anak bini, hidup senang lenang."(Begitulah lebih kurang bunyinya tapi maksudnya sama.
Kini;
- Aku juga menuturkan nasihat yang senada itu kepada adik-adikku, anak-anak cucuku, anak-anak didikku. Anak-anakku,Kekawanku, para atasanku, para pemimpinku dan masyarakatku juga menutur nasihat yang sebegitu kerana Kita percaya kita berjaya memenuhi segala hajat, impian,keperluan dan kehendak diri kita kerana kita sentiasa ingat dan ikut nasihat ayah ibu dan guru-guru kita yang sebegitu rupa dan kurasa generasi mendatang juga akan memberi nasihat yang sama.
Dan
- Dipagi syawal ini, aku mencari kebenarannya. Mencari adakah Ilahi dan Rasul yang aku ikuti menasihatkanku sebegitu ?
Wallahualam
- Sewaktu aku mula nak belajar kenal abjad dan angka, ibu ayah, abang kakak, pakcik, makcik, cikgu-cikgu, ustaz-ustaz dan tok-tok guruku menasihatkanku "Sekolah dan belajar rajin-rajin, jadi pandai sampai dapat masuk universiti. Nanti senang dapat kerja-dapat gaji. Dapat duit, dapat beli kereta, dapat beli rumah, dapat beli tanah. Ada anak bini, hidup senang lenang."(Begitulah lebih kurang bunyinya tapi maksudnya sama.
Kini;
- Aku juga menuturkan nasihat yang senada itu kepada adik-adikku, anak-anak cucuku, anak-anak didikku. Anak-anakku,Kekawanku, para atasanku, para pemimpinku dan masyarakatku juga menutur nasihat yang sebegitu kerana Kita percaya kita berjaya memenuhi segala hajat, impian,keperluan dan kehendak diri kita kerana kita sentiasa ingat dan ikut nasihat ayah ibu dan guru-guru kita yang sebegitu rupa dan kurasa generasi mendatang juga akan memberi nasihat yang sama.
Dan
- Dipagi syawal ini, aku mencari kebenarannya. Mencari adakah Ilahi dan Rasul yang aku ikuti menasihatkanku sebegitu ?
Wallahualam
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
sembang 4 - ISLAM JEWS or YAHUDI ISLAM ? fikir-fikirkanlah sendiri
You can't be a Jewish Muslim
Instead of bringing about the secularization of Judaism, Zionism turned religion into the central element of the definition of national identity, and turned the State of Israel into a tool of the religious redemption project.
By Lev Grinberg
Just like the story about the late Israeli politician Moshe Sneh, who raised the tone of his voice because his arguments were not persuasive, Professor Shlomo Avineri raises the tone in his reply to Salman Masalha, both of whose opinion pieces appeared on these pages earlier this month, and paints him as a racist. But Masalha did not claim that there is no Jewish people or that Jews do not have the right to self-determination. His argument is simple: If the state is defined by religion, it cannot treat all its citizens equally, as required of a democratic system of government.
Its true that from its inception, Zionism intended to turn the Jewish people from a religious community into a modern nation, but Avineri ignores the regrettable fact that the project of secularizing the Jewish people has failed. Israel has no legal definition for Judaism other than the religious definition, it does not recognize an Israeli national identity defined on the basis of citizenship, and it does not recognize a Hebrew nationality that is culturally defined.
The comparison to other countries where religion and nationality are linked is irrelevant, because those countries have a secular definition of the state and citizenship. You can be a Polish Jew or an Egyptian Jew, but you can't be a Jewish Muslim or a Jewish Christian.
In the attempt to make the Jewish people a nation like all others, Zionism strove to unite it through one language and concentrate it in one territory. There were arguments and struggles over this, and they were decided in favor of preserving the centrality of religion in the definition of the national collective. Instead of picking one of the languages that Jews spoke day in and day out, Hebrew, the holy tongue, was chosen.
Regarding territory as well, absolute secularists did indeed think that Jews could be settled in Uganda or Argentina, but the gravitational pull of the Land of Israel was decisive. The Bible was transformed from a religious text into Zionism's title deed, the justification for the demand for ownership of the territory. In other words, instead of bringing about the secularization of Judaism, Zionism turned religion into the central element of the definition of national identity, and turned the State of Israel into a tool of the religious redemption project, especially after the capture and settlement of biblical areas since 1967.
Defining the State of Israel solely as democratic and revoking the special privileges of Jews does not contradict Zionism, and certainly not Judaism. The connection to Judaism will remain in the calendar and the Hebrew language, in the name of the state and in the Jewish majority (if we manage to free ourselves from our rule over the Palestinians in the territories ).
Democracy is based on universalist Jewish values, such as "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" and "Ye shall have one statute, both for the stranger, and for him that is born in the land." That requires separation of religion and state, something that will be good for both. Because in the current situation, not only does religion corrupt the state, but the state corrupts religion and pushes it toward nationalistic extremism.
Why isn't Israel a modern, democratic nation-state? I suspect that the secular Jews are not ready to relinquish the special privileges that the Jewish state grants them. With no other definition for Judaism, they are ready to accept the yoke of the religious establishment and give up democracy and equality. In my view, that is the meaning of the continued impossible defense of a Jewish and democratic state.
Woe to such Zionism: conservative and complacent, lacking imagination and vision. After such a bitter failure, we should start thinking of tikkun, of repair. Tikkun is a kosher concept; it's both Jewish and democratic.
The writer is a political sociologist and the author of books including "Imagined Peace, Discourse of War: The Failure of Leadership, Politics and Democracy in Israel, 1992-2006" (in Hebrew)
Instead of bringing about the secularization of Judaism, Zionism turned religion into the central element of the definition of national identity, and turned the State of Israel into a tool of the religious redemption project.
By Lev Grinberg
Just like the story about the late Israeli politician Moshe Sneh, who raised the tone of his voice because his arguments were not persuasive, Professor Shlomo Avineri raises the tone in his reply to Salman Masalha, both of whose opinion pieces appeared on these pages earlier this month, and paints him as a racist. But Masalha did not claim that there is no Jewish people or that Jews do not have the right to self-determination. His argument is simple: If the state is defined by religion, it cannot treat all its citizens equally, as required of a democratic system of government.
Its true that from its inception, Zionism intended to turn the Jewish people from a religious community into a modern nation, but Avineri ignores the regrettable fact that the project of secularizing the Jewish people has failed. Israel has no legal definition for Judaism other than the religious definition, it does not recognize an Israeli national identity defined on the basis of citizenship, and it does not recognize a Hebrew nationality that is culturally defined.
The comparison to other countries where religion and nationality are linked is irrelevant, because those countries have a secular definition of the state and citizenship. You can be a Polish Jew or an Egyptian Jew, but you can't be a Jewish Muslim or a Jewish Christian.
In the attempt to make the Jewish people a nation like all others, Zionism strove to unite it through one language and concentrate it in one territory. There were arguments and struggles over this, and they were decided in favor of preserving the centrality of religion in the definition of the national collective. Instead of picking one of the languages that Jews spoke day in and day out, Hebrew, the holy tongue, was chosen.
Regarding territory as well, absolute secularists did indeed think that Jews could be settled in Uganda or Argentina, but the gravitational pull of the Land of Israel was decisive. The Bible was transformed from a religious text into Zionism's title deed, the justification for the demand for ownership of the territory. In other words, instead of bringing about the secularization of Judaism, Zionism turned religion into the central element of the definition of national identity, and turned the State of Israel into a tool of the religious redemption project, especially after the capture and settlement of biblical areas since 1967.
Defining the State of Israel solely as democratic and revoking the special privileges of Jews does not contradict Zionism, and certainly not Judaism. The connection to Judaism will remain in the calendar and the Hebrew language, in the name of the state and in the Jewish majority (if we manage to free ourselves from our rule over the Palestinians in the territories ).
Democracy is based on universalist Jewish values, such as "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" and "Ye shall have one statute, both for the stranger, and for him that is born in the land." That requires separation of religion and state, something that will be good for both. Because in the current situation, not only does religion corrupt the state, but the state corrupts religion and pushes it toward nationalistic extremism.
Why isn't Israel a modern, democratic nation-state? I suspect that the secular Jews are not ready to relinquish the special privileges that the Jewish state grants them. With no other definition for Judaism, they are ready to accept the yoke of the religious establishment and give up democracy and equality. In my view, that is the meaning of the continued impossible defense of a Jewish and democratic state.
Woe to such Zionism: conservative and complacent, lacking imagination and vision. After such a bitter failure, we should start thinking of tikkun, of repair. Tikkun is a kosher concept; it's both Jewish and democratic.
The writer is a political sociologist and the author of books including "Imagined Peace, Discourse of War: The Failure of Leadership, Politics and Democracy in Israel, 1992-2006" (in Hebrew)
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