More Thai Muslims flee to Malaysia

A third group of Thai Muslims crossed into neighboring Malaysia, complaining of harassment by the military in Thailand’s Muslim south.

The group, which consists of seven men and 17 women aged between one and 57, said they had been beaten by Thai forces and that their sons were either missing or detained, according to the Malaysian Star newspaper.

The Thai government, which was installed after a bloodless coup in September, says that it is working on a policy of reconciliation to restore peace in the Muslim south, where more than 2,000 people have killed in three years of violence.

But recent attacks in the southern provinces have prompted Thai authorities to tighten security measures.

A spokesman for the Thai group, which arrived in Malaysia on Saturday, told the Star newspaper that a bomb attack on a mosque in his village had made it difficult for Muslims to gather to pray.

"Last week after the bomb blast, which injured scores of my neighbors, Thai soldiers came and simply arrested youths," he said, adding that many young men were missing or feared dead.

The group says that it is not seeking political asylum but wants the Malaysian government to stop the violence against Muslims in the four Thai southern provinces of Narathiwat, Yala, Pattani and Songkhla.

Malaysia’s immigration department officials could not be reached for comment, and an official of the UN refugee agency in Kuala Lumpur said it had no information on the case.

The escape of the Thai Muslim group follows the flight of 131 Muslim asylum seekers from southern Thailand in 2005, who are still being held in a Malaysian immigration depot, and an incident last December in which a second group of 20 Thai Muslims crossed into Malaysia.

Former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was toppled last year, has been accused of applying heavy-handed policies against Muslims in the south.

Last November, Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont vowed to bring about national reconciliation, and apologized for Thaksin’s tough policies which were blamed for stoking unrest in the south.

Coup leader Sonthi Boonyaratglin, the first Muslim to lead the Thai military, said that the apology showed the government’s willingness to resolve the conflict in the south.

However, the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission said the apology should be followed by the arrest of guilty officers involved in the death of innocent Muslims.

Malaysia is a mainly Muslim country, while Thailand is predominantly Buddhist. Relations between the two neighbors had been strained over the violence in Thailand's largely Muslim far south.

Thailand's three southern provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat were all an independent Muslim sultanate before being annexed a century ago.

-- AJP and Agencies

The UN, Good for Nothing..!

In the year 1945, 50 original member countries signed the UN charter in San Francisco. Among many of the world body’s goals, the UN was initially established to support human rights, promote social and economic progress, protect the world against future wars and equalize men and women.

However, the most dominant member; the U.S., hindered the UN missions mainly through its Security Council veto power.

Even though, at every incident people would be encouraged by the presence or arrival of the “Blue Helmets” or peacemakers” as the international community prefers calling them; disappointment usually follows their mission. Mostly these peacemakers have caused more conflict and disruption than they have maintained peace enforcing agreements and aiding reconstruction.

Other than providing the right aid when it comes to health, education, food assistance and social development, the UN’s history holds many failures to maintain any of the most important tasks.

Despite the fact that the UN has been involved in Lebanon through the “UN Interim Force in Lebanon – UNIFIL” since March 1978, Israel has invaded and destructed many parts of the country without establishing any peace or security. As a matter of fact an Israeli bomb hit the UNIFIL base on the 25th of July 2006 killing four military observers. That’s not all, UNIFIL in South Lebanon is also known to be an ally to Israel and the US to the extent that it can engage in confrontation against Hezbollah and would do the fighting as well as the dying for Israel.

• Darfur

In Sudan, the UN has another failure for the history to record; in 2005, the UNMIS was established in Sudan to supervise the Comprehensive Peace Treaty between the Sudanese government and people.

And even though it was successful in ending the 22-year war, it is still unable to finish the conflict that is taking place in Darfur. The UN estimates deaths to total 6,000 Africans a month as a result of the military attacks, the cutoff of sources of food and water and disease. However, it might seem like a perfect mission for the Blue Helmets, the 8,000 member have so little chance to cover the 3 huge regions encapsulating all of Western Sudan.

On the other hand, Congo is one of the most disgraceful missions in the history of the UN. The MONUC began its operations in 1999 in an attempt to manage the ceasefire agreement, which wasn’t an easy task for the same reason in Sudan; the country is the size of Western Europe. The failures begin with being unable to effectively intervene during the second Congo War, which resulted in the deaths of five million people in 4 years. That’s not the most terrible part, it’s also reported that the UN peacemakers are sexually abusing and gang raping girls at the age of 12 and 13, which is wide spreading despite many revelations and probes by the UN office of Internal Oversight Services.

There is no end to the disappointments of the UN in many countries; Burundi, Ivory Coast and Liberia were among many countries, which uncovered the similar sexual abuse that took place in Congo.

The UN also holds a long list of failures; including failing to protect misplaced people in the civil war in Angola, also failing to condemn slavery in Sudan, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone and many more, not to mention its failure to prevent or intervene in Iraq war.

It’s become crystal clear that the controlling hand over the UN (that is the U.S.) has caused a defect in the performance of such organization that was established in the first place to help lift people’s sufferings instead of pushing them further in new ones.

--AJP and agencies

Bird Flu: Another Israeli weapon against its “enemies”?

By: Ahmed Abdullah

The Gulf emirate of Dubai has decided to check air passengers before being allowed entry on suspicion of carrying the lethal H5N1 strain of bird flu and Saudi Arabia declared an emergency aimed at preventing the outbreak of the virus, after it has reportedly killed more than 160 people all over the world, according to the World Health Organization, with many cases uncovered in Arab and Middle East countries.

An article published earlier on the state-run Syrian daily al-Thawra drew suspicion that Israel may have developed the bird flu virus as a new weapon to avenge Arabs and harm the genes of its Arab neighbors.

The article, which also said that Israel buried 85,000 infected birds in the occupied West Bank that eventually infected a Palestinian from Jerusalem with Avian Influenza, a highly infectious notifiable disease affecting many species of birds, including commercial, wild and pet birds, blamed Israel for the spread of the deadly virus in the Far East to mislead the world.

The Syrian paper cited a report released in 1998 by the Sunday Times alleging that Israel is developing a biological “ethnic bomb” that would kill Arabs and not Jews.

The Times report said that Israeli scientists were doing experiments at the Institute for Biological Research in Nes Tsiona near Tel Aviv to identify genes characteristic to Arabs so as to develop viruses that attack these genes.

“The question being asked today is whether the virus chosen by the Zionist for their ‘ethnic bomb’ is bird flu?” the newspaper wrote.

“If the virus is designed to hurt Arab genes specifically, it will nevertheless spread beyond the Arab world,” the paper warned, noting that the whole world would soon start suffering from some uncontrollable pandemic.

The same report published by the Syrian paper accused Israel of poisoning the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat using biological viruses.

“We recall that the assassination of Yasser Arafat was done using a biologically engineered virus to which only the Zionists had a remedy,” the paper wrote.

It’s noteworthy that in November 2004, same month Yasser Arafat died, The Financial Times reported that Palestinian officials suspect that the Palestinian leader had been poisoned and that his death wasn’t natural, a suspicion that had been reiterated by the lack of a diagnosis by the French medical team treating President Arafat, which analysts at that time said was a key factor in fuelling such speculation.

There were also reports sugesting that the cooks in Arafat's compound had been questioned.

Could the deadly virus, which has so far killed 24 Egyptians, mostly women or girls, be another weapon used by the Israelis to achieve strategic goals, instead of pursuing diplomatic means, that would require direct talks with rivals in Iran, Syria and Palestine?

Speed up Firefox..!

1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!

Muslims could become Europe’s dominant population

While church attendance in Europe is continuing to decline, the level of Muslim religious participation and the Muslim population itself is exploding, according to an article on CNSNews.com.

Recent surveys show that church attendance in Western Europe is dropping precipitously.

According to a 2005 survey by Christian Research, a UK think tank, only 6.3% of the British population attended Christian services on a weekly basis.

The research group also suggested that around 4,000 churches will close over the next 15 years, being sold off or rehabilitated for other uses.

Meanwhile, experts say more European Muslims are becoming more devout, going to mosques and learning more about their religion.

In recent years, young European Muslims returned to the faith which their parents observed only sporadically, according to the CNSNews article.

Although Muslims only make up around 3% of Britain’s population, Christian Research says that in 35 years there will be twice as many Muslims in mosques on Friday as there are Christians in churches on Sunday.

A 2004 ICM poll showed that 51% of the 500 British Muslims surveyed prayed every day.

In November, a study by the Spanish magazine Alba said that more mosques and Islamic centers have been built in France than churches over the last century, with over 4,000 mosques currently serving the largest Muslim population in Europe.

Tens of thousands of Muslims immigrated to Europe over the last century, and thousands of European Christians are converting to Islam each day, leading some experts to predict that Muslim immigrants will become the dominant population in the continent by the end of this century.

In January, the Islam-Archive Central Institute, a government-sponsored think tank, predicted that Muslims will be the majority population of Germany by 2046, based on fertility rates.

Nicole Bourque, a British professor of religious studies at Glasgow University, predicted that more Christians would embrace Islam in the coming years.

She said she knew of around 200 converts in Glasgow alone, mostly lapsed Christians who had grown up without a strong religious background.

While many of the converts were women who married Muslim men, Bourque said many others have been attracted to learn more about Islam by its increased profile since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

-- AJP and Agencies