Suicide bombers go global
By Assaf Moghadam The Boston Globe
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2005


CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts The struggle against terror



The geographic spread of suicide attacks, which reached the Jordanian capital of Amman this month, tells an alarming tale: Unlike in the 1980s and 90s, the grievances motivating today's suicide bombers are less concrete and more virtual and vicarious. To curb the recent spate of suicide missions we must understand this fundamental shift in the causes that give rise to human bombs.

Since modern suicide attacks began in the early 1980s in Lebanon, the tactic has been employed mostly by fighters in localized conflicts with identified belligerent parties that were geographically confined.

Traditionally, suicide missions have been used by groups seeking to establish a national homeland or ward off a foreign occupier - meaning that the attacks happened close to home. For instance, Hezbollah, the pioneer of modern suicide bombings, conducted an overwhelming majority of its suicide attacks in Southern Lebanon to drive out the Israelis.

Traditionally, suicide recruits have tended to be locals as well. More than 99 percent of Palestinian suicide bombers since 1993, for example, have been from the West Bank or Gaza. In over a dozen suicide bombings against its Turkish nemesis, the Kurdistan Workers Party similarly relied on local Kurdish recruits.

Most suicide bombings of the 1980s and 90s were in response to occupation. But resistance to occupation does not explain some of the most fatal bombings the world has seen since 9/11 in Bali, Casablanca, Istanbul, London, Baghdad, Riyadh and now Amman. So what characterizes the new globalization of martyrdom? Three elements are critical:

First, the new suicide attacks are transnational in nature and in their aspirations. Today's human bombs are more ambitious geographically and politically and are operated by cells connected to transnational movements. Modern martyrs often sacrifice themselves beyond their own borders, as became painfully apparent to the United States on 9/11. In Iraq, too, the overwhelming majority of suicide bombers are from Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and other countries, but rarely Iraqis.

That the goals of the global jihad movement are transnational has recently been affirmed in a letter by Al Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in which he calls for the establishment of a caliphate "in the manner of the prophet," to be spread over as many countries as possible. This leads followers to believe that apostate regimes like the House of Saud or the Hashemite Kingdom in Jordan must be overthrown in the process.

Second, the new martyrdom is driven by a humiliation that differs significantly from the concrete grievances of traditional suicide bombers. The motives of the bombers of Bali, London and probably those of Amman are not rooted in the humiliation of a personally experienced occupation.

Many of today's martyrs, in fact, have enjoyed a relatively comfortable upbringing. Theirs is a suffering and humiliation felt vicariously through the calamities of their brethren in Iraq and Palestine. They are thus humiliated partly by guilt.

The third fundamental element is the role of the Internet, which, as the scholar Reuven Paz has noted, has turned into an "open university of jihad."

The Web plays a crucial role in the indoctrination, training, and recruitment of today's martyrs. It exploits the humiliation and anger sensed by many Muslims, while offering them an opportunity to "make a difference." It appeals to would-be-bombers to undo their fellow Muslims' plight by sacrificing themselves for a new, transnational Muslim nation.

Some have argued that ending occupation in Iraq and other places is the key to solving the jihadist problem. But we should be disabused of the belief that withdrawal alone will appease the new martyrs. Instead, the countries affected by suicide attacks must step up the battle for the hearts and minds of alienated young Muslims.

This war of ideas should expose the hypocrisy of global jihad, but it must also consist of a more sensitive engagement with the Muslim world.

(Assaf Moghadam is a research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's JFK School of Government and author of the forthcoming book ''The Roots of Terrorism.'')

The grandeur of evolution
Verlyn Klinkenborg
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2005


NEW YORK In the summer of 1868, Charles Darwin and his family visited the poet Alfred Tennyson and his family on the Isle of Wight. The visit - and the visitor's ideas - troubled Tennyson. "What I want," he later told a friend, "is an assurance of immortality."

This was an astute remark. Many of Darwin's readers, then and now, have tried to find ways to reconcile a divine creator with the clearly secular implications of Darwin's theory of evolution. As often as not, the effort is less a search for a first cause than a plea for assurances of immortality. Tennyson recognized that Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," which was published in 1859, offered no such promises.

What bothered Tennyson wasn't merely the possible loss of eternity. It was also the central observation that underlies Darwin's theory: The fact, first noticed by Malthus, that every species on the planet, including humans, produces far more offspring in each generation than nature can support. Coming as late as we do - nearly a century and a half after Darwin's "Origin" - we have the luxury of seeing at a glance what Darwin saw: that the pressure of so much excess population is a harsh but efficient test of the value of accidental variations in any species.

We can say, with Thomas Huxley, "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" But, of course, Darwin did not simply think of it. He prepared for years to be ready to think of it when he did. It is one thing to see the logic in evolution, as stated on the page. It is something entirely different to have pieced together such an astonishingly powerful theory - a word that, as scientists use it, means an explanation of the facts as we know them - from the details of nature itself.

The new exhibition called "Darwin" at the American Museum of Natural History in New York portrays the making of the man and the scientist, and it reminds us how well and how fully evolution explains the life around us. It also captures the way Darwin's theory opened an entirely new window in the human imagination.

It is possible to say, in fact, that humans did not begin to understand their place in nature until 1859. I found myself wondering, oddly, what it must have been like to be alive at such a revolutionary moment. But we live in a moment that is no less revolutionary. "Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound," Darwin wrote. In our time - the DNA era - the mechanisms of those laws have been revealed in ways that Darwin could only dream of, and in ways that confirm the essentials of his theory beyond a shadow of a doubt.

This exhibition is useful, too, in reminding us that the controversy in America over evolution - over a true understanding of the human place in nature - has been more or less constant since 1859, though it has reached a peak of political absurdity only in our own time. The basic objections to evolution - the ones trumpeted by the proponents of so-called intelligent design - are essentially the ones Darwin described in the sixth chapter of "Origin." They have been given a new language, and new examples have been adduced. But Darwin did a surprisingly good job of forestalling his critics. He showed that most of the objections to his theory, then as now, were based on a misunderstanding of the evidence or the nature of his argument, or were owing simply to the fact that so much remains to be discovered about the workings of life on Earth.


Darwin presented the strongest, most detailed argument and evidence for evolution that he could. He also carefully presented the strongest objections to his theory that he could. Under a century and a half of close examination, his theory has grown more and more solid - with refinements, of course. Under the kind of scrutiny that Darwin bestowed on himself, the notion of intelligent design vanishes in a puff of smoke like the bunkum it is.

"I do not attack Moses," Darwin once wrote, "and I think Moses can take care of himself." But the problem is not Moses, or Jesus or God. It is humanity itself. To the extent that the furor over evolution represents a cultural crisis in America - and only in America - it is a crisis of credulity, not faith, a crisis rooted in neglect and ignorance.

To lose the assurance of immortality is a serious thing, if it were ever ours to have. At the end of the "Origin" Darwin famously wrote, "There is a grandeur in this view of life." There is also an apologia in that phrase. He knew how hard it would be for us to see ourselves truly.

Las Vegas Mayor Says Off With Their Thumbs

Bonkers Las Vegas leader Oscar Goodman called for graffiti artists who deface the notoriously gaudy gambling Mecca to be beaten and mutilated with Sharia style punishments in a bizarre televised outburst this week.

"In the old days in France, they had beheading of people who commit heinous crimes," the Vegas Mayor pointed out.

"We have a beautiful highway landscaping redevelopment in our downtown (area). We have desert tortoises and beautiful paintings of flora and fauna. These punks come along and deface it. I'm saying maybe you put them on TV and cut off a thumb," Mr Goodman suggested, adding 'I'm dead serious'.

London electro producer/ DJ Richard Sen, who served two jail terms in the UK for graffiti art in the 80s, condemned the Mayor's proposal, telling Skrufff 'this is such a ridiculous notion, it is impossible to imagine. Pretty much no deterrent would have stopped me when I was doing graffiti."

"Sure it would be hard to use a spray can without a thumb but you could still use a nice fat magic marker to tag," Richard continued, "And if kids wanna' write then they could probably manage to spray after practising for a while with no thumbs. Why not cut off their hands completely to make sure?"

Richard's punishments in the UK included spells in notorious young offenders' institute Feltham and adult prison Brixton, neither of which stopped his behaviour, he admitted.

"I was sent to a detention centre known for its extremely harsh regime and that experience made me come out and do it worse," he recalled, "In the end, I grew out of tagging naturally and got into other things, namely music."

Finding salvation through raving, Richard went on to form acclaimed electro outfit Bronx Dogs and more recently, he's started recording as Padded Cell. As a tagger though, he was known as Coma, painting tube trains and walls across London during the 80s both before and after his first time in borstal.

"I think this Mayor needs to spend his time on more important things like crimes against people not property," Richard concluded, "How many fuking highways look beautiful to you?"

Padded Cell's new single Signal Failure (hotly tipped by the Glimmers, T Jackson and Tiga amongst others) is out on DC Recordings on November 14

http://www.freewebs.com/hiphoprock/goinunderground.htm ('The 1st case of graffiti on an Underground train in London was on a Big Met in August 1984, and is documented in the archives of London Transport. Its hardly surprising that the Big Met Line was targeted by writers because of its similarity to the Subways of New York, with its big smooth panels and mile upon mile of surface stations for perfect opportunities to take
photos of pieces running. One of the early train writers to exploit this fact was "Coma" . . .')






"I woke up in extreme pain and felt like my groin area was on fire and I had a severe headache." (KDKA TV, US)Ken Slabby tells a US court of the moment he realised his vengeful ex-girlfriend Gayle O'Toole had super glued his penis to his chest, and the
cheeks of his buttocks together before painting side burns and polka dots on his head with nail varnish.


"They left me there, going through all that stress. They just let me rot. This is not Home Depot's fault. But I am blaming them for letting me hang in there and just ignoring me." (The Boulder Daily Camera, US) Bob Dougherty, 57, explains why he's suing a shop after staff allegedly dismissed his cries for help as a hoax, when he became stuck on a toilet seat that had been smeared with superglue by pranksters.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG01/barillari/pantherintro.html ('Introduction "How to Stage a Revolution")

http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/churchfinalreportIIIc.htm ('THE FBI'S COVERT ACTION PROGRAM TO DESTROY THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY: 'The Select Committee's staff investigation has disclosed a number of instances in which the FBI sought to turn violence-prone organizations against the Panthers in an effort to aggravate "gang warfare."')

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SA/en/display/15 (Political Trials and Prisoners in the United States:' Just as China invades and occupies Tibet for forty years yet denies "occupation," the U.S. has tried and imprisoned tens of thousands of people politically since World War II yet denies the existence of political prisoners . . .')

Top Tory Leadership Candidate Challenges Ecstasy Taboo

Hotly tipped Conservative politician David Cameron proposed adopting harm reduction based policies towards drugs on a televised debate this week, and called for ecstasy to be downgraded to Class B instead of Class A, a level below heroin and crack cocaine.

"The most important thing we thought was to make sure that the drug classifications make sense to young people and were credible," Mr Cameron said on the BBC's Question Time show, "And I had a concern that if you put ecstasy and heroin in the same classification, people just don't take it seriously. On the Home Affairs Committee that is what we recommended."

His forward thinking comments were consistent with those he made in 2002, when a cross party committee of MPs he served on recommended ecstasy the same thing after they examined the genuine health risks associated with different drugs rather than the falsehoods and drug war propaganda that dominate most mainstream debate.

"Drugs policy in this country has been failing for decades. Drug abuse has increased massively, the number of drug-related deaths has risen substantially and drug-related crime accounts for up to half of all acquisitive crime," Mr Cameron pointed out in a statement issued by the committee at the time.

"I hope that our report will encourage fresh thinking and a new approach. We need to get away from entrenched positions and try to reduce the harm that drugs do both to users and society at large."

His enlightened position attracted support from fellow former Tory candidate Michael Portillo who applauded his consistency and supported his position,

"Ecstasy can exceptionally kill but to class it alongside heroin makes the law an ass," he wrote in his Sunday Times column, "(And) I doubt whether it will ruffle the Tory membership, many of whom take a worldly view. Among the electorate as a whole, Cameron's stand will go down well," he predicted.

http://www.schmoo.co.uk/cannabis/dreport.htm Home Affairs Committee report 2002: The Home Affairs Select Committee has called for a major shake-up of the Government's drugs policy, concentrating on education and harm reduction for users rather than criminal sanctions.

http://www.crimestatistics.org.uk/output/page63.asp (British Crime Survey: 'Violent crime happens disproportionately during weekends, this pattern is strongest for incidents of stranger violence, with half of all incidents occurring between 6pm on Fridays and 6am on Mondays. Most common place for stranger violence was at a pub or club with a third of all incidents occurring there . . .')

http://www.crimereduction.gov.uk/violence04.htm (Shootings, gangs and Violent incidents in Manchester: 'Violence in general, gun violence in particular and fatal shootings are mostly concentrated in specific small areas . . .')

http://www.apa.police.uk/APA/Features/Stop+and+search/Stop+and+Search.htm
(Stop and search official rules)


http://www.d-holliday.com/tmore/utopia.htm (Thomas More: 'I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than hat they are a conspiracy of the rich, who on pretence of managing the public only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill acquired, and then that they may engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please . . ')

http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/bacon/atlantis.html (Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (written in 1624): 'There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried . . .')

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/c/campanella/tommaso/c18c (Tommaso ampanella: The City Of The Sun: 'And they consider him the more noble and renowned who has dedicated himself to the study of the most arts and knows how to practise them wisely. Wherefore they laugh at us in that we consider our workmen ignoble, and hold those to be noble who have mastered no pursuit, but live in ease and are so many slaves given over to their own pleasure and lasciviousness; and thus, as it were, from a school of vices so many idle and wicked fellows go forth for the ruin of the State . . .')

http://www.trackitdown.net/news/100133.html
This Is Dahlia- Confessions Of A Call Girl

"I wanted to be tasted. Licked. Touched. I wanted to be needed.
Desired. I wanted someone to feel hunger for me. I wanted someone to ache for
me. I wanted it all desperately, but I didn't know how to get it. How
do good girls get it? Good girls don't get it, because good girls don't
want it. I wanted to be wanted like a bad girl gets wanted . . ."

"I'd always felt very repressed sexually in my 'normal life', I wasn't
satisfied with the typical 'sexual expectations' that other girls I
knew seemed to be happy with and I wanted more but I didn't know how to
get it.

And in fact, the sex industry work was incredibly empowering for me ?
at that time ? because it gave me a way to develop this other side of
myself that I couldn't manage to develop otherwise, that side that likes
being dirty and trashy . . . (more)"


http://www.vintagekink.com/balloons/indexxx.htm (Vintage balloon porn)

http://www.balloon-guys.com (Men blowing Up balloons fetish)

http://www.deviantdesires.com/faq/faqmain.html (FAQ: Why are there so
many more male than female deviants? While sexologists estimate that
only one in one hundred fetishists is female, some fetish-oriented
websites, like Balloon Buddies, find the average more like one in thirty . .
.')



New York's No Dancing Laws Face Court Challenge

Village Voice nightlife commentator Trish Romano called on revellers
and clubs to actively support a lawsuit challenging New York's infamous
anti-dancing Cabaret Law this week, suggesting fear and apathy is
preventing people from getting involved.

"Club owners are afraid to testify, and patrons and proprietors alike
simply don't care, because the city's not messing with them too much.
For now, anyway," said Romano.

"Such self-centered self-preservation is short sighted. The cabaret
law, as long as it's on the books, will be dusted off whenever the city
needs a magic weapon to wield against the unseemly world of nightlife."

Under the infamous Cabaret law, New Yorkers are allowed to dance in
just 221 venues compared to over 12,000 premises in the 60s, with clubs
and bars facing closure if patrons violate the no dancing rule, though
cops have recently relaxed enforcement somewhat, according to Larry Tee.

"Just as cigarettes are becoming more commonplace again in many
establishments here in New York City, the general feeling in the clubs is that
there is less and less enforcement of the Cabaret laws," said Larry.

"Many hot clubs have even run dance floors for long periods of time
without any interference from the nightclub monitors."

Larry, who currently runs Thursday weekly Distortion Disko at the
licensed venue Duvet, admitted he didn't know much about the campaign to
overturn the law, though agreed that the threat from the Cabaret Law
remains very real.

"The interest in changing the laws is still very intense because the
spectre of having enforcement appear again could definitely arise again
with one nasty incident that gets the media attention," said Larry.

"Local politicians still hold an unhealthy disregard of the importance
of a vital nightlife scene to the economy of New York."

Joe's Pub owner Serge Becker, who is backing Paul Chevigny's case with
sworn statements agreed, telling the Village Voice "We can't let it
stand and leave it to the benevolence of the powers that be."

"History has clearly shown us that a closet fascist like Giuliani is
just around the corner," he warned.

http://www.maskon.com/kerry/masks/index.htm (home made full head latex
Female masks

http://www.unassistedchildbirth.com/miscarticles/milkmen.html (Men who
breastfeed)

Filthy French House Producers Fail To Clean Up For Brazil

Hotly tipped Parisian duo Justice confirmed this week that a recent
study suggesting that nine of ten French people hate soap and 1 in 25
never shower is true, and stressed that even though they'll soon be jetting
off to Brazil for a mini DJ tour, they'll be maintaining the rigorous
no washing regime.

"Unluckily, our Brazilian trip falls out just before our annual bath in
the Seine," the pair explained.

"It seems that using soap is bad for health and that's why we use a
blend of ashes, sand and pig grease. It is much better, and girls are
irresistibly attracted by the animalistic scent it exhales," they told
Skrufff

Gaspard and Xavier formed Justice in 2003 after meeting at a party when
Xavier spotted Gaspard spitting beer on a girl's hair, though the pair
stressed they've recently become much better behaved toward the ladies.

"It's been two years that we didn't get out of our flat, so we've
forgotten everything about love, girls and what it feels like to be hooked,"
they revealed.

"So it won't be difficult for us to be convinced that Brazilian girls
are the best lovers, certainly because French girls are awfully
pretentious, and arrogant. But that's why we love them so much."

Justice play Rio de Janeiro @ Dama de Ferro on Friday November 25, and
Sao Paulo @ ampgalaxy, on Saturday November 26. They also perform at
London's Bugged Out the week before (November 19) alongside Riton and
James Holden prot?g? Nathan Fake).

Suicide bombers don't want peace, and as long as they keep it up they won't get it either. Kinda sad really.....