A textbook on Islam that preaches the value of “holy war” and “martyrdom” for all Muslims is being reprinted by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority for use in schools in the occupied West Bank.
Entitled Islamic Culture, it was originally published in 1994, but has been reproduced this year, despite undertakings from Palestinian leaders - following international pressure - that new books would be introduced.
The book, intended for 17-year-olds, explains: “Jihad is an Islamic term that equates to the term war in other nations. The difference is that jihad has noble goals and lofty aims, and is carried out only for the sake of Allah and for His glory.”
Silly Palestinians, who don’t even know their own religion! Why, the smart people in the West know that it just means “exerted effort” and not “war”.
The current energy bill contains a provision to shield companies supplying MTBE, a federally mandated gasoline additive from liability, because MTBE is highly toxic. This, of course, was well known at the time it was federally mandated. Now some Senators want to reward trial lawyers at the expense of private companies for the federal government’s mistake in federally mandating the additive.
MATTHEWS: This half-hour: Is Al-Jazeera telling the truth about the U.S. occupation in Iraq? MSNBC’s Bob Arnot takes a look.
Take a note of that. The interview with Bob Arnot, NBC Cheif foreign correspondent, goes on
We’ve been invited by the ayatollah. Why? He is furious at the press coverage. He says not only American television, but Arabic satellite TV, such as Al-Jazeera and the Abu Dhabi station, have misportrayed the great success that is Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
(voice-over): The people of Khadamiya tell us that the picture painted by Al-Jazeera and other Arab satellite stations is a bleak one of daily death and destruction. Khadamiya’s leaders are so eager to show Iraq’s real story that the ayatollah himself sends his top lieutenant with us, Haji Ali (ph).
we visit a new radio and TV station run by Shia, an unheard-of freedom under the old regime. At the station, everyone we talked to agrees the Arab media is not telling the truth about what’s happening here. And Al-Jazeera tops the list. […]
As we’ve seen, Iraqis themselves are angrier than the American administration about the barrage of negative stories coming out of Iraq, so angry that the ayatollah himself broke the rules and allowed to us come into this, one of the holiest sites in all of Shia Islam, right during the height of Ramadan
One has to ask - why is Matthews focusing on Arab media when the stories there are no different on US media? And can’t Bob Arnot do something about it, like handing out assignments to other NBC reporters? At least Arnot put out this report, so maybe all is not lost. But it’s kind of sad when the local media is indistinguishable from the propaganda of hostile countries.
The European Union is failing to keep track of huge annual subsidies, and 91 per cent of its budget is riddled with errors or cannot be verified, a financial watchdog said yesterday.
The European Court of Auditors refused to certify EU accounts for the ninth successive year, saying Brussels has failed to match reform rhetoric with a genuine change of culture. Abuse is said to be endemic in the Common Agricultural Policy, which still consumes almost half the £65 billion budget.
Checks on subsidy claims for suckler cows found that 50.2 per cent of animals in Portugal and 31.2 per cent in Italy were false. The “error rate” in forage and crop acreage was 89.7 per cent in Luxembourg, 42.9 per cent in Sweden, 34.5 per cent in France and 19.2 per cent in Britain, despite increased use of satellite photography to spot fraud.
I guess “accounting” isn’t one of the “core competencies” in the new EU Constitution so they don’t have to be any good at it.