konane's Blog

"Two and a half months have passed since the bloody massacre in Dongzhou village, Shanwei, Guangdong province. Many people are watching closely the current situation of the villagers. Since the bloody massacre, the government has set a tight blockade in the village, they are continuously searching, arresting and tapping telephone calls.

For more than seventy days, Dongzhou villagers were afraid to visit other villagers or answer telephone interviews. On January 24, all patients from the hospitals were forced to go home to their villages. After the Chinese New Year, the suppression by the CCP escalated, villagers were once again arrested, tortured and interrogated. Now they can no longer tolerate the maltreatment.

Orphans Beg on the Streets

On the morning of Feb 18, at 8 am, victims of the Shanwei incident and family members of those missing and arrested, escorted a dozen orphaned children who have no income to survive on, to Dongzhou Second Village and started begging on the street. Some relatives of the missing villagers cried openly asking for justice, sparking off a mass gathering of other villagers. Villagers expressed concern that the CCP's unscrupulous humiliation would spark off a rebellion.

Children of injured villagers, and orphans, begging on the streets. (The Epoch Times)

The ages of the children who were out begging, ranged from 3 to 12 years old. Some of them had lost their fathers who were beaten to death, leaving behind a widowed mother and child, with no means of supporting themselves. Some belonged to parents who were wanted for being "instigators" of the shooting incident and were forced to flee from home, and others had parents who were badly injured and unable to work.

Witnessing the tragic scene of children begging on their knees and cries from the victims finally ignited a resentment in the hearts of the Dongzhou villagers who for nearly eighty days had tolerated this incident. More and more villagers gathered together and many donated money to the orphans. An elderly man angrily reprimanded the government officials who had rushed to the scene, he said "I am 77 years old this year, arrest me and beat me if you wish. The Communist Party are used to lying! This is ridiculous!"

A crowd gathers to protest. (The Epoch Times)

People from other villagers were saying, it looks like our village representative has returned. According to the villagers, the three village representatives who were arrested were highly regarded.. When they were still around, the local village official and police were afraid of them and would not dare to interfere with the villagers. However since their arrest during the December 6 incident, under the insistence of the government, these local bullies wantonly arrested and beat the villagers, forcefully entering their houses and make house searches as they pleased. The villagers were too afraid to voice their anger. But today it seemed as if the village representative was around, everyone shouted and cried to their hearts content all the grievances that had been suppressed .

The crowds slowly dispersed around 3 pm in the afternoon after villagers urged the children to return home. However the residents surmised that these children who have lost the means to a livelihood, will soon be back to beg for a living as the government will not resolve this problem.

The child of severely injured Liu Muzong, has nobody in her family to care for her and she has no means to survive. (The Epoch Times)

Around Jan 24, eight injured hospitalised villagers including Chen Tianjin, Tang Dahan, and Liu Muzong were evacuated from the hospital by the authorities with the excuse of going home to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Some of them saw the real intention of the government and refused to leave the hospital. They were persuaded everyday to change their minds and finally they gave in and returned to their village. At present, there is no one who cares about their situation - there is no doctor, and a lack of medication to treat their injuries.

A few days ago, several injured villagers who had difficulty supporting themselves went to the government office to ask for subsistence. But as usual the officials ignored them and even reprimanded them severely. Several family members of those detained by the authorities requested to visit them to give them something for New Year, but were also rejected.

The whereabouts of the missing remains unknown. Many villagers speculate that these villagers were probably massacred and their bodies could have been cremated during the December 6 incident. The authorities tried to cover up the actual death toll and used "detention" as an excuse to deceive family members and avoid public scrutiny.

The Dongzhou villagers had a quiet Chinese New Year. The villagers on the run were afraid to return. And once the New Year festivities were over, the authorities started to arrest villagers and repeatedly tried to force them to reveal where explosives were hidden. The police beat and kicked them when the villagers told them they did not know.. All of them suffered varying degrees of torture.

Yet in the official media it was reported that everything was peaceful. According to the villagers' description, since the December 6 incident, the government has continuously broadcast propaganda on the Shanwei TV station news, that they had sent out many task forces into Dongzhou village to help resolve the situation of the poor and had taken out social insurance for the villagers, and that the situation in Dongzhou village has returned to normal.

But in reality, everything is in contrary to what is reported in the news. The villagers said, the government tells lies openly, villagers have no recourse to justice, their livelihood is destroyed and they live in fear and under pressure everyday. Sooner or later, the villagers will rebel. Related articles:

Massacre in China Draws Global Attention
Shanwei: Father Pleads Guilty For Son, Arrested Villagers Tortured
After Massacre Terror Continues in Chinese Village
Shanwei Shootings: Photos from Shanwei
Shanwei Shooting: Photo Gallery
Bloody Suppression of Farmers in Shanwei; 70 People Shot to Death by Police

http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/6-2-20/38422.html 

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the Bush administration had approved the sale of British firm P&O, which manages six U.S. ports including New York, to Dubai Ports World after a classified review and the deal would include safeguards to protect U.S. national security.

"You can be assured that before a deal is approved we put safeguards in place, assurances in place, that make everybody comfortable that we are where we need to be from a national security viewpoint," Chertoff said on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

But Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said it was a mistake for the administration to approve the sale and called on Congress to investigate it.

"It's unbelievably tone deaf politically at this point in our history, four years after 9/11, to entertain the idea of turning port security over to a company based in the UAE who avows to destroy Israel," Graham said on "Fox News Sunday."

"I don't think now is the time to outsource major port security to a foreign-based company," he said."  ..... continued

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyid=2006-02-19T163451Z_01_N19219437_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-PORTS.xml&rpc=22

Senate

http://senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

House

http://www.house.gov/

This is the most recent and perhaps most dramatic in a long series statements by prominent politicians about the putative threat of man-made global warming. On what did Tony Blair base his alarming view? New scientific insights? Or on an unshakable secular faith, which seems to fill the vacuum left by the demise of traditional religion? I surmise the latter. Because in the field of science there seems to be some shift towards a more sober look at the climate issue, witness the numerous studies which appear in peer-reviewed journals, which are either explicitly critical of, or implicitly inconsistent with the man-made global warming hypothesis.

The ongoing discussion on the "hockey stick" graph -- a reconstruction of temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between the years 1000 and 2000 -- offers a case in point. This debate entered a new phase when Steve McIntyre, one of the foremost hockey-stick critics, who had long been ignored, if not ostracized, by the global warming community, was officially invited by the National Research Council of The National Academies of the United States to participate in a special committee. This committee was requested to summarize the current scientific information on the temperature record over the past two millennia, describe the proxy records that have been used to reconstruct pre-instrumental climatic conditions, assess the methods employed to combine multiple proxy data over large spatial scales, evaluate the overall accuracy and precision of such reconstructions, and explain how central the debate over the paleoclimate temperature record is to the state of scientific knowledge on global climate change. It was exactly the mandate which Steve McIntyre had been advocating all along.

Politicians regard the studies by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the ultimate climate bible. Unfortunately, they do not read the comprehensive reports which form the basis of the whole exercise. They only read -- if at all -- the alarmist passages in the "Summary for Policy-maker", which have been skewed through an elaborate and sophisticated process of spin-doctoring. Details of this practice have recently been revealed by the French climatologist Marcel Leroux in his book, Global Warming - Myth or Reality? The Erring Ways of Climatology.

Disapproving these practices, various renowned scientists have distanced themselves from the IPCC. In the US, Chris Landsea, a hurricane expert, is one example. In the Netherlands, Henk Tennekes, former director of the research department of the Royal Meteorological Institute, and Hans Oerlemans, glaciologist and laureate of the prestigious Spinoza Award, have done the same.

Political leaders assume that climate science is sufficiently advanced to legitimize all kinds of draconian measures which have a profound impact on our society and economy -- measures which, moreover, encroach upon the liberty of the individual citizen. But if we take a closer look, this appears not to be the case. Contrary what is often argued, there is no consensus among scientists on the man-made global warming hypothesis.

Ironically, just as global warming scare-mongering reaches new heights, the global cooling hypothesis is making a come back. It should be recalled that the frightening images of imminent global warming disaster are of fairly recent vintage. After all, in the 1960s and 1970s various prominent climatologists held the view that it was not global warming that formed a mortal threat to humanity but global cooling.

Recently the astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov of the Pulkovo Astronomic Observatory in St. Petersburg declared that the Earth will experience a "mini Ice Age" in the middle of this century, caused by low solar activity. Temperatures will begin falling six or seven years from now, when global warming caused by increased solar activity in the 20th century reaches its peak. The coldest period will occur 15 to 20 years after a major solar output decline between 2035 and 2045, Abdusamatov said. This view is shared by the Belgian astronomer, Dirk Callebaut, who expects a "grand minimum" in the middle of this century, just like the Maunder Minimum (1650-1700), a period during which the Thames, the Seine and the Dutch canals were frozen in winter.

If these astronomers are right, the hundreds of billions of dollars the world will spend every year on the fight against global warming will have gone down the drain. But, of course, we are not sure of imminent global cooling. On the other hand, we are not sure whether there will be catastrophic global warming either.

What to do in the face of this uncertainty? The earlier-mentioned climatologist, Henk Tennekes, recently argued in an interview in the most prominent Dutch weekly, Elsevier: "We only understand 10 percent of the climate issue. That is not enough to wreck the world economy with Kyoto-like measures."

Amen.

Hans Labohm, co-author of Man-Made Global Warming: Unravelling a Dogma, recently became an expert reviewer for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=021006B

"Al Gore Event Funded by Bin Laden's Family

"The Saudi Arabia seminar that was addressed by former Vice President Al Gore over the weekend in a speech that criticized the U.S. for being too tough on Arabs was sponsored, in part, by Osama bin Laden's family.

On Saturday, the state-run Saudi news outlet Arab News reported that the Jeddah Economic Forum, where Gore spoke, was funded by "Saudi Arabian Airlines, the Saudi Binladin Group, Gulf One Investment Bank, Saudi Basic Industries Corp." and an array of other big companies with ties to the Middle East.

The Saudi BinLadin Group - which is Saudi Arabia's largest construction company - is run by Osama bin Laden's brothers and cousins. Jeddah, the site of the forum attended by Gore, is Osama bin Laden's hometown.

Although family members claim they've disowned bin Laden, his mother told reporters after the 9/11 attacks that she received advanced warning from him that something big was about to happen.

A wealthy bin Laden niece also reportedly abandoned her lower Manhattan apartment three weeks before the 9/11 attacks.

The BinLadin Group's longtime involvement in the Jeddah forum has been widely reported in the Mideast and European press.

In January 2002, ex-President Clinton addressed the JEF, which paid him $267,000 for his speech. According to London's Financial Times:

"The conference was dominated by the Saudis' desire to overcome the pressures of September 11 and strengthen U.S.-Saudi ties . . . The BinLadin Group, one of the forum's backers, has been battered by its association with Osama."

Other JEF speakers that year included President Bush's younger brother, Neil.

It's not known whether - or how much - Mr. Gore was paid for his speech."

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/2/13/182926.shtml?s=ic

Somehow our own lefties could be inserted into this article with their hair-on-fire determination to remove the 10 Commandments from court houses, prohibition of Nativity scenes, etc..... while creating a postage stamp tribute to Islam after 9-11.  

Were we not in America which has some freedoms remaining intact, we'd probably see full scale parallel destruction of our own icons held sacred since our nation's inception..... just like the left's ideological clones did when communinsm spread through China and Russia.  Those of us who are old enough know the drill.   

"The New Iconoclasts

By Lee Harris

Source  Tech Central Station Daily

"The word iconoclast, when it is used nowadays, most often refers to a person who "attacks established beliefs, ideals, customs, or institution," as Webster's Third puts it -- a definition that turns the iconoclast into a cultural rebel or a free thinker, an individual willing to buck the establishment.

By this standard, the Danish cartoonist who drew the controversial caricatures of Mohammed was an iconoclast in our modern sense, and was simply doing what many cartoonists have done before him, using his gifts to poke fun at sacred cows. True, the sacred cow, in this case, was the Prophet Mohammed, revered by millions of Muslims across the globe. Yet the artists who created the popular TV series South Park routinely represent the figure of Jesus in all manner of mocking ways -- in one episode, Jesus was portrayed in boxing shorts, fighting a grudge match against Satan. No doubt many Southern Baptists were offended by such a caricature. Yet none of them rioted about it.

Here in the contemporary West, for better or worse, there is no cow so sacred that it cannot be made sport of on national television, let alone in cartoons in small scale periodicals. We may regret this or we may rejoice over it, but in either case, we must recognize that the role of the court jester has been valuable in the West precisely because the court jester is permitted to remind the king that he is only human -- and what a useful function that can serve. Thus, parody is a prophylactic against pomposity -- though it is equally serviceable as a collective defense mechanism against fanaticism.

The fanatic is the man who will not allow you to poke fun at his particular sacred cow. He takes his creed so seriously that he refuses to permit anyone else to treat it as a subject for humor or levity.

The topic of fanaticism, however, takes us back to the original meaning of the word iconoclasm, a Greek word that literally means the shattering or destruction of an image, either a visual image, like the icons beloved by Greek Orthodoxy, or the kind of statues that were admired by Roman Catholics. Here the iconoclast is not creating an image designed to provoke irreverence, the way a cartoonist does, but he is intent on eliminating all offensive images completely and totally.

There were two great iconoclastic movements that shook the Byzantine Empire, first in the eighth century, and later in the ninth century, both of which exhibited the same fanatic zeal in destroying the thousands of icons that adorned Byzantine churches and monasteries. Why? Because the Byzantine iconoclasts argued that what were regarded by many as beautiful artistic treasures were in fact acts of sacrilege and blasphemy. They were not to be removed from the churches and monasteries, in order to be carefully preserved in a museum, as a government of zealous atheists might do -- no, they were to be destroyed root and branch.

Many modern historians have argued that the outbreak of Byzantine iconoclasm in the eighth century was the result of the expansion of the intensely iconoclastic Arab conquerors that had occurred in the previous century -- an expansion that gobbled up large chunks of the Byzantine Empire in what is now Syria. For the Arabs, however, it was not enough merely to destroy the sacred icons of Greek orthodoxy -- for them, all pictorial representation was forbidden. You could not draw a man or a pea or a cat, nor could you make statues of them -- and any drawings or statues of them you came across had to be immediately destroyed.

The Protestant Reformers, who were also iconoclasts, were less severe. They simply wanted to obliterate any image of the Virgin Mary or of the Catholic Saints that they did not themselves accept -- and here again, not even a thought was given to the idea of sparing the item due to historical or artistic value.

Wherever iconoclasts triumphed, they did not rest content until they had destroyed all the images that they found to be sacrilegious -- what we in the modern West automatically regard as harmless art, the iconoclasts see as hideous blasphemy; and while to us a "mere" cartoon can be amusing or disgusting, none of us would wish to see every image of it effaced from the earth. We would preserve it simply because of its documentary value, if for no other reason. That is why the iconoclast is, by definition, a fanatic. He feels he has a mission to destroy all the images that he holds to be against his fanatical creed. All must perish.

It has been almost half a millennium since the last outbreak of iconoclastic fanaticism in the West. Yet if you try to discover a republication of the Danish cartoons on the reputable Internet sites, you will discover that they are not being posted. CNN on line noted that they would not be showing the cartoons "out of respect for Islam." Nor does CNN's stance seem to be exceptional. Meanwhile, profuse apologies are being offered to the Muslim world by men who had nothing whatsoever to do with either the creation or the publication of the cartoons, and who are denouncing the cartoons for being…cartoons.

In short, the new iconoclasts are winning -- they are realizing that they have the power to make us suppress any image that they find disagreeable to their stern and mirthless fanaticism -- even if it is just a funny cartoon in a paper published in a cold corner of Europe, far far from Mecca.

Either Muslims need to begin to get a sense of humor, or we need to became a great deal more serious. "

Lee Harris is author of Civilization and It Enemies.