Collingwood smash “Bears” / “Lions” // Silly nutzis // Hot Wheels

Collingwood

Turn that frown upside-down Jonathan Brown — you and your idiot fans. After a very poor first half:

Magpies smash the Brisbane Lions!

COLLINGWOOD 12.23 (95)

BrisbaneFitzroy BearLions 8.7 (55)

nutzi

In other, highly-amusing news, Very Ill Bill White has been denied bail by ZOG in the person of Magistrate Judge Morton Denlow.

Denlow based his ruling, in part, on a post White made to his Web site in which he described waking up every morning with the urge to “kill, kill, kill.”

White will remain in custody while awaiting transfer to Roanoke, where he faces additional charges of making threats by telephone and e-mail and through his now-defunct Web site, overthrow.com.

~ Federal judge denies bond for neo-Nazi White, Laurence Hammack and Tim Taliaferro, The Roanoke Times, August 1, 2009.

I suppose if Hal Turner the nutzi FBI informant weren’t also behind bars, he could call for Morton’s murder.

In other nutzi news, White Supremacist Accused, With a Minuteman Leader, of Killing a Mexican and His Little Girl Allegedly Murdered Two Others Earlier (Rick Barrs, Phoenix New Times, July 31, 2009).

White supremacists are such brave individuals.

Kameraden in Germany are also facing an uphill battle to cleanse the country of subhuman elements, as Squabbling neo-Nazis set for election drubbing — or so reckons The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution’s (BfV / Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) Brandenburg and Saxony Anhalt branches anyways. Apparently:

…the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) and the German People’s Union (DVU) have squandered support they built up at previous elections… Under the electoral pact, the parties had agreed not to run candidates against one another. Its dissolution means the parties are likely to split the far-right vote…

The trend within the scene is moving towards more isolated and regional right-wing extremist groups, [Winfriede Schreiber, head of the Brandenburg branch] said. The NPD has been relying on using loosely organised neo-nazi gangs to build local support, he said…

The NPD and, in particular, its youth wing, the Junge Nationaldemokraten are increasingly dominated by neo-nazis, [Volker Limburg, head of the Saxony-Anhalt office] said. Senior party officials move freely between the party structure and the neo-nazi scene.

Furthermore, the Organisation of Neo-Nazis in Comradeship, which represented autonomous nationalists, seems largely to have broken up.

In its place, loosely connected organisations have cropped up, mostly on the internet, Schreiber said. Cross-state cooperation was “rare if it happened at all.”

Hot Wheels

Finally, my favourite Australian Europe correspondent, Paola Totaro, reports that German radicals turn to arson (The Age, August 1, 2009); something Brett Neely of Bloomberg reported over five months ago (Arsonists Torch Berlin Porsches, BMWs on Economic Woe) but which is still evidently (Good) News. Writes Totaro: “In a city haunted more by its extreme right-wing past, Berlin is in the throes of a renaissance of extremist, left-wing political activism. And torching cars, particularly expensive ones, has become the crime de rigueur.”

If only.

In reality, Berlin has long been a centre of left-wing political dissent, entartete Kunst and entartete Muzik. From the late 1960s, through to the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, Berlin — and in particular the Kreuzberg neighbourhood — has been a centre of German anarchist and autonomist politics. One of the city’s principal attractions for yoof during this period (that is, prior to the collapse of Communism and German re-unification) was West Berlin’s legal and political status as a territory under the control of the Allies, not the West German government. Yoof living in the city were thus exempt from military conscription, and able to spend their time making trouble for the authorities, rather than enforcing their rule.

For more fun maps of burning luxury cars, see : Brennende Autos Berlin, eine Chronologie der Brandanschläge. Also: http://www.erstermai.nostate.net/ | http://strassenauszucker.blogsport.de/ | http://wba.blogsport.de/ | http://actiondays.blogsport.de/ — all are in some crazy foreign language, possibly a Greek dialect, dunno.

About @ndy

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I like anarchy. I don't like nazis. I enjoy eating pizza and drinking beer. I barrack for the greatest football team on Earth: Collingwood Magpies. The 2024 premiership's a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.
This entry was posted in Anarchism, Anti-fascism, Broken Windows, Collingwood. Bookmark the permalink.

10 Responses to Collingwood smash “Bears” / “Lions” // Silly nutzis // Hot Wheels

  1. Jamie-R says:

    Guess who you’re playing this week!

    I am taking a vow of sober for Saturday night cause I want to have all the power of my sober mind when we beat the Pies and their assistant coach weeps into the arms of Malthouse. (Actually I gotta work Sunday, so yeah.)

  2. Jamie-R says:

    It’s like the early days of preparing to land on the moon!

    Sorry, couldn’t but not comment on Eddie’s comparison of prepping Nathan for the coaching job…

  3. Jamie-R says:

    You’re pretty quiet about all my ribbing, like for the longest time now, maybe you really are apathetic as your blog title suggests.

    I’m not. I can be whipped up into a frenzy by Dean Brogan violence.

  4. @ndy says:

    Jamie-R,

    I am not apathetic, I am busy finishing a very long post to which I will almost certainly receive fuck-all response. More to the point: I very much look fwd to the spectacle of the Mighty Magpies forcing Adelaide loserfans to eat humble pie made from Crows’ guts.

    This is WAR!

  5. Jamie-R says:

    A long post? If it offends me enough I may get emotional, and I may then cry for your soul. But first I drink! I actually don’t have a chance to touch the drink again till this time next week cause I’m a committed working family man, but while I can!

    I WANT TO HURT YOU!

    Above all Kingdoms! Above all thrones!

    Above all money! Above to him!

    Above all powers!
    Above all things!
    Above all nature!
    Above all created things!
    Above all wisdom and all created (Nathan Buckley Underwear Meat Pie) things!
    You were here before I could shit on what Eddie McGuire brings!

  6. Jamie-R says:

    Okay I have half a bottle of Courvosier left. I won’t wield it here. But you got WHAT YOU GOT. Oh you evil marxist you. Yeah I hurt you. I leave smiling! I don’t wanna know!

  7. Jamie-R says:

    I would apologise for shitting on your blog last night but I’ll do it again, I even slandered you as a marxist!

    All Eddieheads are.

    I actually came here yesterday to see if you said anything about the attack in Sydney, I know you’re apathetic and I basically know you’re a Melbourne artist who understands your city’s culture, but! I know this is one place where the torch of rational leftism in this country burns bright, so I go to you! It’s like John Humphreys at Thoughts On Freedom, he is a pantheistic pagan libertarian, but I hold him up as rational rightism in this country.

    This is what I told my mates on Facebook about the Holsworthy Barracks:

    It just hit home for me when my mum mentioned what it meant to the family. My father lived in Tasmania, if he didn’t volunteer to go to those barracks and Vietnam eventually they never would have met in Sydney. FYI, she kicked sand on his Elvis records at a beach party, that’s how it all started.

    You know, we may all be in our 20s and 30s, but we are the future culture of our nation, I reckon all of us will meet each other later on in life, cause no one else cares about this stuff! They really don’t! Hopefully during an Adelaide Crows victory against Nathan Buckley’s charges, okay that was low, but, made me feel good.

  8. Jamie-R says:

    Let’s see Gary Ablett Jnr do this

  9. @ndy says:

    The attack in Sydney?

    Um… I take it you mean the alleged plot to attack Holsworthy? Dunno. I’ve read/seen a few news reports. Five men have been named — Nayef El Sayed, Saney Edow Aweys, Wissam Mahmoud Fattal, Yacqub Khayre and Abdirahman Ahmed — and the following provides a basic summary:

    Melbourne terror accused in court outburst
    Thomas Hunter
    The Age
    August 5, 2009

    One of the Melbourne men charged with preparing a terrorist act has directed an angry outburst at the magistrate hearing his case this morning.

    Wissam Mahmoud Fattal, 33, told the Melbourne Magistrates Court he was not a terrorist and accused Australian troops of killing innocent people overseas.

    “You call me a terrorist but I’ve never killed anyone in my life,” Fattal told magistrate Peter Reardon.

    “You send troops to Iraq to kill innocent people.”

    Fattal, who was already in custody on unrelated matters and is charged with conspiring to prepare a terrorist act, refused to stand before Mr Reardon, saying it was against his religious beliefs. But the magistrate did not accept the principle that it was a religious act.

    Two other men, Abdirahman Ahmed and Yacqub Khayre, also appeared in court this morning charged with preparing a terrorist attack.

    Ahmed is also charged with breaching the Foreign Incursions and Recruitment Act, and engaging in a hostile act in a foreign country.

    They were arrested yesterday after pre-dawn raids on 19 properties across Melbourne and regional Victoria foiled an alleged plot to attack the Holsworthy army base.

    Another man detained yesterday, Saney Edow Aweyz, is expected to appear in court this afternoon to face the same charge.

    All of the men were remanded in custody to reappear on October 26.

    On Somalia…

    Somalia
    Ignacio Ramonet
    Le Monde diplomatique
    February 2007

    THE United States, heavily engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq in its global war on terror, is now fighting on a third front in Somalia (1). Washington assembled an anti-terrorist coalition in the Gulf of Aden in 2001 and it is clear from recent air raids and the deployment of US battleships that it regards the Horn of Africa as part of the theatre of operations in its battle against al-Qaida.

    It is up against the Union of Islamic Courts, funded by Mogadishu traders who had had enough of Somalia’s warlords and their multiple abuses. Union forces drove the warlords out of Mogadishu last June and began to bring order to Somalia after nearly 15 years of chaos.

    The US takes a narrow view of the fight against terrorism. It had backed the warlords and was not prepared to accept the new order, especially as the Islamic Courts were rumoured to be receiving aid from Iran. The US had run a programme of military assistance to Christian Ethiopia since 2002 and the Pentagon encouraged it to launch an offensive against Somalia, providing aerial reconnaissance and satellite surveillance support.

    The Ethiopian campaign was a blitzkrieg: the areas held by the Islamic Courts were occupied within a week, Mogadishu was taken on 28 December 2006 and 20,000 Ethiopian troops are now deployed in Somalia. The US-led International Somalia Contact Group, set up last June, met in Nairobi, Kenya, in January and called for the proposed United Nations peacekeeping force to be sent in urgently. So far only Ethiopia and Uganda have agreed to send troops. Washington has agreed to grant $16m in aid to the interim Somali president, Abdullahi Yusuf, as well as humanitarian aid and a further $24m, $14m of which is to be allocated to the peacekeeping force. The Bush administration has accused the Somali Islamists of sheltering terrorists Fazul Abdullah Muhammad and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, involved in the 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

    Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaida number two, responded by calling on Islamist fighters to resist: “I appeal to my Muslim brethren everywhere to respond to the call for jihad in Somalia. The real battle will begin by launching your campaigns against the Ethiopian forces.” He recommended “ambushes, mines and suicide bombs” and urged the Islamists to employ the tactics used by insurgents fighting US-led forces in Afghanistan and Iraq (2).

    Abulrahim Ali Modei, spokesman for the Islamic Courts, claims his movement has not lost the battle (3). His men have regrouped south of the Juba river, on the border with Kenya, in a zone where the Ethiopians and US special forces have been pursuing the Islamists with backup from AC-130 fighter aircraft based at Djibouti. The capture of Kabul in 2002 and Baghdad in 2003 did not solve the problems of the Taliban or Iraq, and the capture of Mogadishu by the Ethiopians has not solved Somalia’s problems. They are just beginning.

    (1) Or possibly a fourth front. Bush declared that Lebanon was “the third front in the global war on terror” when Israel launched its offensive against Hizbullah in August 2006.
    (2) BBC News, 5 January 2007.
    (3) International Herald Tribune, 4 January 2007

    The Ruination of Somalia
    Philippe Leymarie
    Le Monde diplomatique
    November 21, 2007

    As the United Nations focuses attention on Somali, little is reported concerning the role the United States has played in the tragedy, as it continues to engage in semi-secret operations, using Ethiopian troops as surrogates, says Philippe Leymarie.

    Guerrilla warfare has continued in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, since the fall in January of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), which controlled much of the centre and south of the country. The huge Bakara market in Mogadishu, known for its stalls selling arms and munitions, went up in flames in October after rebels attacked the defence ministry. Radio Shabelle, one of the few independent stations, was forced off air by the army, and its director, Bashir Nur Gedi, was assassinated on 19 October. Sheikh Muktar Robo Abu Mansur, the head of the underground Shabab (youth) movement, the radical wing of the Somali nationalists, has claimed: “Our mujahideen fought fiercely with the Ethiopian invaders and their Somali lackeys. The enemies of Allah responded with heavy artillery. The market was burned to the ground in their quest to destroy Islamic property in Somalia.”

    According to the UN’s special envoy, the Mauritanian Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the humanitarian situation in Somalia is the worst in Africa. Many emigrants continue to flee towards Yemen across the Gulf of Aden. Some ten thousand made the crossing between this January and August, but 500 others are dead or missing. In September there were reports of boats adrift, filled with dead refugees; other refugees had been sprayed with acid by their “guides” and their bodies tossed into the sea. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, others came under fire near the Yemeni coast.

    Ethiopian forces entered Somalia in December 2006 to remove the UIC, which had held power for six months. And yet the Ethiopian foreign minister, Seyoum Mesfin, and Ali Mohamed Gedi, who has now announced his resignation as prime minister of Somalia’s transitional federal government (TFG, long based in Nairobi and then in Baidoa in Somalia), raised the Ethiopian flag over the new Ethiopian embassy in Mogadishu. The ceremony gave Gedi an opportunity to say: “Our country’s peace and stability has been endangered by a handful of extremists who claim to be religious, which runs counter to the principles of Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance.”

    The same day, the head of the Ethiopian mission in Somalia claimed that his troops were “an army of liberation, not an army of occupation.” A few days earlier the Italian foreign minister, Patrizia Sentinelli, had come to a different conclusion after a meeting with the Somali president, Yusuf Abdullahi, who owes his position to Ethiopia’s tanks. The presence of Ethiopian troops was, Sentinelli said, unacceptable to the Somali people and they should leave as soon as African Union peace-keepers were fully deployed: 1,200 Ugandan soldiers have been on the ground since March, out of a projected force of 9,000.

    Anti-Ethiopian feeling

    Anti-Ethiopian feeling is strong in Mogadishu. Ethiopia and Somalia are ancient enemies: they went to war in 1964 and 1977-8, over a border dispute and the sovereignty of the Ogaden region, where the population is mainly Somali but which is governed by Ethiopia. To gain control of the capital this April after an offensive by the UIC militia, a movement “created by businessmen seeking a semblance of normality in a city controlled by warlords,” Ethiopian artillery shelled districts believed to be most hostile, killing 1,700 people and provoking the exodus of hundreds of thousands.

    Ethiopia’s recent intervention in Somalia was meant to dislodge the UIC, which refused to recognise the legitimacy of the transitional government established with support from the international community. In invading Somalia, Ethiopia benefited from considerable support from the United States, which has conducted war by proxy in Somalia. To the US, Somalia has long been synonymous with failure: under President Siad Barre (1969-91) Somalia initially allied itself with the Soviet Union and allowed its fleet to use the port of Berbera. Somalia later switched its allegiance to the US, but that didn’t stop the regime collapsing under pressure from a dozen regional independence movements. Thereafter Somalia slid into a state of chaos from which it has yet to re-emerge.

    To protect a population that had suffered at the hands of feuding clan leaders turned warlords, a multinational operation called Restore Hope was set up in 1992 under US leadership. The UN took over the operation in 1993, absorbing the US contingent. But things went badly wrong when 18 US soldiers were killed in an ambush in the heart of Mogadishu. Their bodies were displayed like trophies and some were dragged through the streets. (These humiliating events were later dramatised in Ridley Scott’s 2001 film, Black Hawk Down, a big hit in Mogadishu’s video shops.) After these events, the United States avoided Somalia and refused to take part in any African operations or peacekeeping missions, even during the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

    Change after 9/11

    After 9/11 things changed: The whole of the Horn of Africa, especially Somalia, came under surveillance. From 2002 the US navy, aided by European navies, has patrolled the Somali and Yemeni coastlines and the Bab el-Mandeb Straits. Task Force 150’s brief is to secure one of the world’s most important seaways to ensure that shipping can reach the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean to the west, the Cape and the Americas to the south, and Asia and the Pacific to the east. The attacks in Aden harbour on the destroyer USS Cole in 2001 — and on the French tanker Limburg the following year — revived fears of a jihad at sea threatening oil supplies and commercial shipping.

    The US navy routinely searches coasters and cargo ships with the aim of preventing members of the Taliban and mujahideen fleeing Afghanistan and Iraq from seeking refuge in the Horn of Africa. The border region of Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia is one of the most notorious in Africa. It connects with the old caravan route to Chad, Libya, Mali, Algeria, and Mauritania on the Atlantic coast.

    In 2002, the Pentagon established a special forces unit in Djibouti, a tiny state previously within France’s sphere of influence. With a force of 2,000, this is the only US base in Africa; located just a few kilometres from the Somali border, it also serves as a launch pad for covert missions, targeting suspected al-Qaida members in Yemen and Somalia.

    Osama bin Laden is believed to have spent time in Somalia in the early 1990s. Some “Afghan” Arabs close to him were implicated in the 1993 attacks on US soldiers in Mogadishu. From 1991 to 1996 he lived in Sudan, where a military coup in 1989 and the establishment of a fundamentalist regime propped up by the National Islamic Front made it a safe haven. He invested in the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant (which the US bombed in August 1998 in retaliation for attacks on Nairobi in Kenya and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania) and in the Al-Shamal Bank. He took on former Afghan Arabs, and began to recruit among the Egyptian faithful — Ayman al-Zawahiri among them. The idea of a global jihad took shape, encouraged by his contacts with Islamists from around the world, but especially from Yemen and Algeria.

    An initial wave of attacks against the US army and other US interests followed: Aden in 1992; Mogadishu in 1993; Riyadh in 1995; Khobar (Saudi Arabia) in 1996, the year in which Bin Laden left Sudan for Afghanistan, where he met Mullah Mohamed Omar, future leader of the Taliban. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri next announced a “global jihad against the Jews and crusaders.” In August 1998, Bin Laden claimed responsibility for the attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, with 224 dead and over 4,500 injured.

    US freezes assets

    A few days after 9/11 President George Bush ordered the freezing of the assets of 27 groups and individuals believed to have links with international terrorism. Among them were Al-Barakat (the blessed), the biggest company in the remittance trade in Somalia (half a billion dollars are sent back each year by the Somali diaspora, providing a living for an estimated 800,000 people), and also the movement al-Ittihad al-Islami (Islamic Union), which is suspected of having taken part in attacks on US helicopters in Mogadishu in 1993 and of giving logistical support to the Mombasa attacks in November 2002.

    Al-Ittihad was defeated in 1997 after an initial incursion by the Ethiopian army, but its leader, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a former colonel who came to prominence during the Somali-Ethiopian war of 1977, turned up again in 2006 as president of the UIC. Aweys denies links with al-Qaida but admits to having had contact with Bin Laden when he lived in Sudan. He considered sharia law as “the only solution to Somalia’s problems” and confirmed he “shared the beliefs of those who see Islam as the target of a global war conducted by the US and its allies.”

    At an opposition meeting in September held at Asmara in Eritrea, Aweys (who is on the US wanted list) described himself as “a nationalist fighting for a free, united Somalia, which the Americans regard as terrorism.” He has challenged Washington to prove his al-Qaida links, noting that US foreign policy is strangely bellicose towards Somalia.

    Somali Islamists, suppressed under Siad Barre’s regime, increased their influence during the 1990s. They took control of Luuq, a small town in the south near the border with Kenya, which had expelled them. In 1996, however, they lost their stronghold in Puntland, a self-proclaimed state in northeast Somalia. Egyptian, Afghan and Chechen members of al-Ittihad began to leave the country as the “local Islamists gave up military activity in favour of doing business with the Gulf states, teaching in Koranic schools and defending sharia” and by 2000 the recently formed UIC was prepared to take part in a first attempt at transitional government.

    But a 1995 UN report claimed that Aweys, who has his base in the Galgaduud region of central Somalia, was already receiving arms from Eritrea and was in touch with representatives of the National Liberation Fronts of both Ogaden and Oromo, which oppose the Ethiopian government. And in June 2006, Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri singled out Somalia and Darfur in western Sudan as places where the battle against the United States should be waged.

    Bans on football and videos

    US secret services have detected dangerous signs of “Talibanisation” in the traditionalist outlook of the UIC, such as bans on music, football, videos, and women working, and are keen to avoid the creation of a new Afghanistan in the region. They tried to buy some of the Somali warlords in February 2006. But the specially created Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism was unable to check the advances of the Islamist militias, who had won overall control of Mogadishu by July.

    This new setback was followed by a bold move: There would be no repeat of Black Hawk, nor any US forces deployed on the ground, at least officially. Instead, with a mandate from Washington, the Ethiopian army marched into Somalia to support the TFG, which had been unable to take possession of its capital. By December 2006, the Ethiopian forces had removed the Islamist militias from Mogadishu. In Baidoa (Somalia), where the TFG is still based, it is claimed that 20% of the prisoners taken during the campaign were foreigners, held to be clear proof of an international jihadist plot.

    But once installed in Mogadishu by the Ethiopians, President Abdullahi had to abandon his plan to disarm the clans and the militias. Popular protests against the presence of the Ethiopian army grew more frequent. Attacks by the resistance resumed around the capital and by 20 March the city centre had fallen into the hands of the insurgents. On 30 March, the battle of Mogadishu began. In April, in an attempt to end it, Ethiopian artillery bombarded the insurgents. The rebel strongholds in the north of the capital fell, and within a few days refugees began to make their way home.

    The US army’s hunt for real or supposed members of al-Qaida continued. In January 2007, it undertook its first major operation, the machine-gunning of a group of “fugitives” by a heavily armed C-130 Spectre gunship, first used in the Vietnam war. Operations such as these, unscrutinised, in semi-secrecy, mark the return of a robust US stance in the secret war in the Horn of Africa. In February, special forces carried out operations in the south of Somalia and on 2 June, a US navy warship fired on targets near the port of Bargal in Puntland, which, it was claimed, were hideouts for “fugitive members of al-Qaida” — though these claims are unverified.

    Raids against the jihadists have also increased in Mogadishu since the Ethiopians and President Abdullahi’s forces took control. Just being a former member of the UIC is sufficient grounds for being classified as a terrorist. Estimates of the number who have disappeared range from 200 to 1,000; they are believed to be being detained in the Villa Somalia in the port or in the National Security Agency’s underground cells. This augured ill for a reconciliation conference scheduled for June in Mogadishu. It opened a month late and lacked any participants from the Islamist groups and the Hawiye, the majority clan. It concluded on 30 August without any significant outcome.

    Reopening old wounds

    In entrusting the dirty work to Ethiopia, the United States has risked reigniting smouldering tensions in the region. In pushing towards an internationalisation of the Somali conflict, it has allowed the Ethiopian and Eritrean regimes, which fought an inconclusive war from 1998 to 2000, to reopen old wounds. Eritrea has little sympathy with the UIC, but has nonetheless provided it with arms: A UN report in November 2006, which warned of a generalised conflict, described an endemic flow of arms into both camps. It accused Eritrea of having made “at least 28 deliveries of arms, munitions and military equipment” (including surface-to-air missiles) to the Islamists, who then controlled Mogadishu after the conflict with the US-backed warlords.

    Last September the Eritrean government, which Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian president, has again accused of supporting Somali’s Islamist extremists, hosted a conference for opposition groups with the aim of creating a “new alliance for the liberation of Somalia”. This organisation’s first act was to call for the withdrawal of the Ethiopian army, which it considers a US pawn. It then launched a new offensive against Mogadishu in September.

    Ethiopia has always supported the TFG. The US government secretly gave it the green light to make emergency arms purchases from North Korea, in violation of the sanctions imposed on Pyongyang by the Security Council — at the request of the US. US foreign policy seems to have accepted that a regime as undemocratic as that of Zenawi — which still has a monopoly on power thanks to the Tigre Liberation Front, which he leads, and which suppresses political parties, unions and student movements — will profit from the war on terror in order to win financial aid and political credit.

    In delegating the task of restoring law and order to Somalia’s enemy, the United States has also opened the possibility that Ethiopia will take part in Somalia’s dismemberment. (In the colonial era Somalia was divided: Present-day Somaliland was ruled by the British, while Mogadishu and the centre of the country was Italian, and Djibouti in the northwest was French.) Since the UIC has called for a holy war against the Christian regime in Addis Ababa, there is also a risk of encouraging a resurgence of Islamism cloaked as national resistance.

    Washington’s policy has done nothing to stop the spread of anti-Americanism, as prevalent in Somalia as in the rest of the Islamic world. It increases the risk of indirectly relaunching the claims of the Ogadenis, Afars and Omoros, nations historically hostile to the centralising ambitions of Addis Ababa, which have long dreamt of the disintegration of the former empire. Africom, the new United States Africa Command launching in 2008, must consider all this if it wants to prevent the Horn of Africa catching fire as it did in the 1970s and 1980s.

    Philippe Leymarie is a journalist with Radio France International – Translated by George Miller.

  10. @ndy says:

    Shock and horror at plot discovery
    Barney Zwartz
    The Age
    August 5, 2009

    MELBOURNE’S Somali and Lebanese communities were shocked and horrified when news broke yesterday of terrorism raids across Melbourne.

    Islamic Council of Victoria spokeswoman Sherene Hassan said the Muslim community was ‘‘more in shock, more concerned than the rest of the community’’ at the possibility of terrorist attacks in Australia.

    Ms Hassan said she feared a backlash against Muslims, after calls on talkback radio yesterday were ‘‘consumed with fear and hatred’’. She had received hate calls herself. She said every Muslim terror suspect’s arrest in Australia had occurred with intelligence from the Muslim community…

    New twist in the old, familiar al-Qaeda story
    Daniel Flitton
    The Age
    August 5, 2009

    Al-QAEDA has long taken an interest in Somalia, even as the wider world has mostly forgotten this blighted country.

    ‘‘Fight on, champions of Somalia,’’ urged Osama bin Laden during a rare recorded speech in March, ‘‘persevere and be resolute, for you are one of the most important armies in the Mujahid Islamic battalion.’’ But al-Qaeda’s strategic guidance to Somalis — particularly to the militant outfit al-Shabab — has centred on fighting local battles.

    Exporting terrorism from Somalia to the West, let alone Australia, is something entirely different…

    Scarred, angry men seduced by recruiters
    Ian Munro
    The Age
    August 5, 2009

    THAT the collapse of a force in Africa allegedly inspired a militant Islamist plot in Australia underlined the global nature of modern terrorism, security experts said yesterday.

    Claims that a group of Somali-Australians had been radicalised fits patterns of Islamist recruitment in the US.

    And recent events showed that al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah were far from spent forces, said Greg Barton, director of Monash University’s Centre for Islam and the Modern World…

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