Log 13.12 [FR] Alger, ville martyre

Alger, 11 décembre 2007: 2 actes terroristes simultanés

Une deuxième fois, le Groupement des Islamistes algériens, récemment adhéré à Al-Quaeda, a frappé la ville d'Alger. Deux "martyrs contre les croisés et les apôtres" ont fait exploser leurs voitures piégées d'une charge explosive de 800 KGs. L'un contre un bus transportant des étudiants à Ben Aknoun (72 morts et bressés). L'autre, visant deux bureaux des Nations Unies, a tué 11 employés de l'ONU, plus un nombre encore inconnu d'autres.

La première série d'attaques terroristes à Alger date du 11 avril 2007 -  (Voir mon article Attaques d'Alger: Solidarité transméditerranéenne demandée, dans ce Journal). Je n'ai aucune hésitation, cette fois-ci, de parler de "terrorisme":

• les cibles ont été choisis quasi par hasard,
  
• le groupuscule qui est à l'origine, ne représente pas (ou plus) les adhérents à un Islam intégriste,
• le seul but concret qu'on puisse distinguer: semer la peur, la terreur.

Imitation de bagdad-2003? 

Si les auteurs des attaques pensent, que les organisations internationales humanitaires, comme la HCRI (Réfugiés) vont se retirer du pays, ils se trompent. L'organisme international des réfugiés ne joue pas un rôle politique à l'intérieur du pays, comme c'était l'intention de la délégation des Nations-Unies à Bagdad, chassée par une attaque meurtrière en 2003. S'ils pensent que le gouvernement algérien se laisse intimider, ils se trompent également: ce gouvernement a gagné une lutte acharnée contre une rébellion terroriste beaucoup plus vaste que la leur et qui a duré dix ans. Quoi qu'on puisse dire sur les méthodes violentes et impitoyables employées par l'armée contre les insurgents de l'époque, en Algérie, il ne s'agit pas d'un gouvernement minoritaire et généralement haï, comme celui de Saddam Houssein.

Les étudiants de Ben Aknoun 

Mais je suis encore plus choqué, indigné et perdu, lorsque je pense à l'attaque meurtrière au bus, transportant les étudiants à Ben Aknoun. Les journaux parlent de la présence de la Cour Suprême algérienne dans les environs. Mais rien n'indique que ce bâtiment était visé. Non, les 72 victimes dans le bus étaient des étudiants du collège Ben Aknoun, haut sur la colline d'Alger. Pour quelle raison? Parce que ce sont des fils et des filles de riches?  Terreur "aveugle"? Erreur de cible?

Je me souviens de la visite que le président Ahmed Ben Bella payait, en juin 1963, vers la fin des trois jours tumultueux de la conférence, à Ben Aknoun. Les délégués européens échangeaient leurs dernieres hostilités idéologiques dans les salles de classe aux étages supérieures. Ben Bella s'attardait dans le hall central, entouré, presque écrasé, par une foule d'étudiants, qui lui posaient leurs questions et écoutaient ses réponses. Vu d'en haut des galeries, comme la reine d'une fourmillière, entourée par une foule de têtes  aux cheveux noirs, coupés court.

C'était l'été des espoirs. Tout semblait possible. Mais les forces obscures  n'étaient pas loin. Celles du passé récent: Un leader FLN de Wilaya, qui refusait de quitter ses armes et ses troupes, campait sur une colline avoisinante. Et aussi les forces qui allaient, progressivement à partir de 1965, créer la stagnation et développer la corruption, qui a produit la presque-théocratisation du pays en 1990. Les publications prises sous contrôle, les biens laissés vacants par les "colons" occupés par la nouvelle aristocratie... Quels espoirs avaient les dizaines d'étudiants du bus, tués, blessés, criminellement ce 11 décembre 2007?

Les gens oublés et relégués, leur courage et leur martyre 

Le complexe scolaire de Ben Aknoun était entouré de terrains vagues, à l'époque. Après le départ des délégués, je me suis promené une fois au début de la soirée, après la chaleur de l'après-midi, sur ces champs. Dans une petite cabane sur la pente, il y avait de la musique. Quand je passais, l'on m'invita à l'intérieur. Parmi les ruïnes du pays, on célébrait un mariage. L'étranger de passage était le bienvenue. C'était mon premier repas à couscous. Assis par terre, autour des grandes casseroles, les hommes. Les femmes sur les bancs autour. Trois musiciens menaient la danse. Hospitalité, espoir, investissement dans le futur. Un souvenir inoubliable.

Et aussi: L'dée qu'un ou deux des fils des jeunes mariés a pu se trouver parmi les victimes absurdes du bus...

Les théoréticiens de la "lutte des civilisations": Alliés objectifs d'Al-Quaeda! 

Et ce que je sens surtout: une rage contre les populistes européens qui se comportent comme les alliés objectifs des terroristes, en reléguant tous ces gens qui ont le courage de se faire une vie décente contre les malheurs qu'ils subissent, en les reléguant, je dis, vers le coin des boucs émissaires des problèmes assez futils notre société occidentale. Pour autant qu'ils soient sincères: C'est une grande erreur historique. La maladie terroriste ne se guérira que par les forces vives dans le corps. Les affaiblir, les criminaliser collectivement: C'est pire qu'une erreur: c'est un crime!

Update on 14-12-2007 by Huib

Également publié sur Toto Le Psycho, le 14.12.07.

Log 12.12 [FR] Adolescents

C° "De Morgen", Belgium, 10.12.07. CORDELIA: "Bad Mama".

Ados...

Elle a à peine 12 ans. Mais elle oscille déjà entre une indépendance totale et l'angoisse d'être abandonnée. Un va-et-vient fréquent, soudain et sans pitié. Objet: les parents, ou le parent de service.

• Le matin, petit déjeuner. Elle arrive: "Feukjou, maman" - "bon matin aussi, chéri"
• "mamaaan?" -  "oui?"
• Elle se met sur les genoux de maman. "en fait, qu'est-ce que c'est, feukjou sonofabitch?"
  
• - "Oh, er... baise-toi, fils d'une chienne?"
• "Èèkes!" -
  
• - "et tu me laisses dire des choses pareillles sans broncher!"

Impossible to do the right thing: Si tu te fâches, tu es autoritaire et pas cool. Si tu la laisses faire, selon les bonnes vieilles prescriptions anti-autoritaires, tu es accusé de ne pas la prendrfe au sérieux. La petite a raison, chaque fois.
Parce qu'elle est deux personnes différentes.

Comment les parents trouvent-ils le même rhytme de transpersonnalisation? Ou devraient-ils se tenir à une seule personne, forte et conséquente?

J'opte pour la dernière attitude. Mais je n'y arrive pas. Car moi non plus, je ne suis pas maître de mes multiples personnalités... 

Ulfkotte: A Secret Services Freak 12.12.07 [EN]

Ulfkotte and the Bloggers: 1. A Secret Services Freak

(From 'A Legal Alien in New York', 10.12.07)

Dr. Strangelove in his horror-lab (this picture does NOT represent Dr. Udo Ulfkotte, concocting AgitProp against Islam in Europe! - It is borrowed from the "Halloween Only" American website. The same website that features a Halloween Chain-Saw plastic gadget, used by Ulfkotte in Akte-Islam Blog, to scare Europeans from Islam. See Akte Islam: Das Hororkabinett des Dr... in In Europa Zu Hause -in German).

October 12, I issued a warning against the manipulations of German Dr. Udo Ulfkotte against bloggers who stand up against racism and discrimination. Since then, the three German bloggers targeted by Ulfkotte, whom I know of, have reorganised their defense against the legal harrassing by the self-appointed "Security Advisor" and his Pax Europa organisation.
Their new, undisclosed, strategy and tactics prevent them from discussing Ulfkotte-related matters for the time being, and, in some cases, even from delivering their contributions to the blogs they are publishing.
This may be considered a temporary victory for Dr. Ulfkotte. Congratulations!
As I am not under the restrictions, my friends are subjected to, I can share with you some findings about Ulfkotte, I made myself recently.

1. A Secret Services Freak

Everything must have started in whiskey-soaked African bars serving as hideouts for foreign reporters on lonesome nights. Ulfkotte was African correspondent for some time during the nineties for the German quality paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). Bloody civil wars were raging. Dubious arms traders chatting at the bar. Foreign mercenaries paid with money from dark sources (oil, diamonds, uranium?) by local dictators and foreign companies, were all around.
English, American, French Secret Services rarely intervened directly, but worked through fake companies and mercenary organisations. But young Ulfkotte felt a belated Silent American. He was part of the grown-ups! Power was dealt with at the pub tables next to him! Udo Ulfkotte may have felt, he finally entered...: Udopia.

A romantic obsession
Maybe, he got remorses about turning down an offer from the German Secret Service BND at the beginnings of the 1980s, when he was invited to join it at a BND-sponsored Students' Seminar in Bonn. That is, at least, what het pretends himself on pages 15/16 in his 2006 book "Der Krieg im Dunkeln - Die wahre Macht der Geheimdienste" (The War in the Dark - The True Power of the Secret Services).
It is, of course, impossible to verify those pretensions. If the BND really has been as naive as Ulfkotte writes, interviewing candidates at the seminar itself and not afterwards, at home or at work, anybody among the twelve candidates interviewed by the Service, who agreed to join it, would have denied so. Basic condition for a real agent, isn't it?

An uninvited Adviser
Anyhow, Ulfkotte started to see himself as part of the Secret Services community. Like a plane-spotter, a tramways freak, a post stamp collector, or, for that matter, a religious fanatic, he concocted intrigues of his own design, and reveled in what he saw as the discovery of the true powers that move history. No complicated economic or social analysis needed any more. No historical research. Truth was given once and for all in religion and/or in "culture" and "civilisation". Politics were nothing but manipulations behind the scenes by the True Powers: the Secret Services.

A freaky love-hate relationship
As most freaks do, Ulfkotte considers himself not only as part of the professional community, but at the same time as their external critic. Not of the principles presiding on the Services themselves, or their existence itself, but of their "Pannen" (failures). Dr. Ulfkotte would have done it better. The above-mentioned book is stuffed with examples of that state of mind of the author.
Like the tramway freak, who loudly criticizes the public transport management, but who melts away, when invited, on a calm Sunday afternoon, to drive a streetcar on an abandoned track from nowhere to nowhere... "Please, photographer, wait until I have the uniform cap right on my head!"

An upcoming journey through Udopia
The above image, which is of course completely this author's supposition, and may not (fully) correspond to reality, could explain many things that have happened (or are reported by Ulfkotte as having so), since those African years.

I intend to confront it with:

• the lawsuit of FAZ and Ulfkotte against accusations that U. was bought by Shell in Western Africa (won by FAZ against Ulfkotte's detractors) and why Ulfkotte left the FAZ shortly afterwards,

• Ulfkotte's pre-Sept.-11 treatment of the Mossad and of Israël and Judaïsm in general (his novel "Gencode-J", 2001),

• his subsequent conversion to a rabiate anti-islamism (2002 sqq, starting with Der Krieg in unseren Städten),

• Ulfkotte's real or pretended problems with Secret Services' harrassment in 2005,
  

• the methodology of the existing Ulfkotte network (political party, commercial security advice, academic teaching, Christian connections, targeted advocacy, relations with the extreme right, commercialization, agitation and propaganda for mobilizing social action against everything Islam and multicultural), and...
  

• (a surprise, not to be disclosed yet!).

Quite a program. I know that you, reader, are thinking: "First see. Then believe.." And you are right.

Perhaps, Mr. Ulfkotte himself will be an exception. For, seeing the hand of one of his enemy secret services behind my actions, as he always does, when somebody takes on him, he will believe that I am "fed" by the CIA, the Mossad, or by one of the German secret services, who are competing amongst themselves.

But I may reassure Mr. Ulfkotte: He is too unimportant to them, to spend on me the large sums I would ask them for. :-)

Juan Cole on another Invasion of the Middle East:: Napoleon in Egypt (1798)

Readers of this Blog, often see my Informed Comment-faves on Iraq and the Middle East in general. Their author, history professor Juan Cole, gets a biographical note below. I borrow the following text from a recent post in the FireDogLake Blog by Swopa.
You should go there and read the interesting discussion of the book between Cole and some readers.

Juan Cole was one of the first and most valuable voices to vault into public attention from the political blogosphere. As America blindly stumbled into Iraq in 2003, Cole's analyses and daily summaries of Arabic-language news at Informed Comment became an essential counterweight to government-dictated propaganda in the U.S. media for tens of thousands of regular readers.

But as an outstanding and experienced historian, Dr. Cole's knowledge ranges far beyond Iraq. In Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East, Cole provides the same perspective and keen insight regarding a military incursion that occurred two centuries ago -- the French effort, led by then-general Napoleon Bonaparte, to invade and occupy Egypt.

Cole’s fluency in both French and Arabic enabled him to scour and compare contemporaneous sources in each language, and the resulting account gives equal weight to each side of the awkward collision of cultures (including attempts to discern the truth when different retellings conflict). And the tone, although well-informed, is scarcely academic -- because Cole's sources include numerous eyewitness journals, letters, and other firsthand reports, he is able to weave a rich, complex narrative that is as involving as any novel on the subject could be.

Although he almost never makes a direct connection, Cole doesn't have to mention Iraq for several elements of his story to resonate with modern-day news junkies. It's hard not to hear the echoes of neocon self-absorption in Napoleon's efforts to blend Enlightenment philosophy with brutal military conquest, or Iraq quasi-viceroy L. Paul Bremer's clueless egotism in Bonaparte's hamfisted communications with the people of Cairo, or especially the similarly dogged, draining insurgencies that result from a distant nation's attempt to impose its will on millions of people.

The details Cole gleans from his research (some of which he continues to post at a blog devoted to the book), though, make Napoleon's Egypt a unique and personal tale worth reading in its own right. With that, I am delighted to be able to introduce Juan Cole, who is joining us to answer questions about the book.

My appreciation: Juan Cole succeeds in doing two things that, on top of one another, normally are above the forces of a normal human being.

• 1. He publishes one or more daily inside-informations about what is going on in Iraq, summarily put into the context of his vast knowledge of the Middlke East political, social, economic and historical landscape. Informed, quick and oblective.
• 2. He continues his in-depth studies, like this one, and plays a role in defending academic freedom against conservative, biased intrusions by the actual US Government, its services and satellite watchdogs, like the AEI & c.

Asked last year, during a brief visit to Holland, how he manages doing so many things in one day, his reply was, that he types very, very quickly on the keyboard... :-)

The Book
The Napoleon book (click on the image to see its Amazon.com page) is reviewed on Amazon by Reed Elsevier as follows:

In July 1798, Napoleon landed an expeditionary force at Alexandria in Egypt, the opening move in a scheme to acquire a new colony for France, administer a sharp rebuff to England and export the values of French republicanism to a remade Middle East.
Cole, a historian of the Middle East at the University of Michigan, traces the first seven months of Napoleon's adventure in Egypt. Relying extensively on firsthand sources for this account of the invasion's early months, Cole focuses on the ideas and belief systems of the French invaders and the Muslims of Egypt.
Cole portrays the French as deeply ignorant of cultural and religious Islam. Claiming an intent to transplant liberty to Egypt, the French rapidly descended to the same barbarism and repression of the Ottomans they sought to replace. I
slamic Egypt, divided by class and ethnic rivalries, offered little resistance to the initial French incursion.
Over time, however, the Egyptians produced an insurgency that, while it couldn't hope to win pitched battles, did erode French domination and French morale. Perplexingly, Cole ends his account in early February 1799, with Napoleon still in control of Egypt but facing increasingly effective opposition. Napoleon's attack on Syria is only mentioned, not detailed, and his return to Cairo and eventual flight to France are omitted altogether.
In a brief epilogue, Cole makes an explicit comparison between Napoleon's adventure in Egypt and the current American occupation of Iraq. Though at times episodic and disorganized, this doesn't detract from the value of Cole's well-researched contribution to Middle Eastern history. Illus. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Georg W. Bush is everything opposite to the 1798 Napoleon. He has no enlightenment objectives. Compare the fate of the invaluable objects robbed from the Iraq National Museum in April 2003 under the eyes of the American invaders with the way Napoleon's expedition opened the way, (through the 3-lingual Rosette Pyramid) to understand ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
I stick to my Caligula comparison. Which is sad enough.
But interesting parallels can be found in the disastrous military history of the temporary occupation. It is there, that Cole applies his "micro"-approach (known from his Informed Comments" on Iraq), citing an abundance of letters home from French participants in the expedition.
The book doesn't describe the end of Napoleon's expedition. However, the way Napoleon and the top generals abandoned the thousands of lesser soldiers they brought to the country, when their defeat became apparent, may forebode the way, in which Bush will end his Iraq adventure.
For European readers, this text is cross posted in "At Home in Europe". I hope to publish shortly a French translation, given the subject, on HUIBSLOG and L'Europe Chez Soi.