Pakistanis See the US as the Biggest Threat

The Al Jazeera network has commissioned a public opinion survey in Pakistan that has yielded some disturbing and surprising results.  The poll, conducted by Gallup Pakistan, showed that 59% of Pakistani’s believe that the United States is the biggest threat to Pakistan.
That many Pakistanis see the US as a threat is entirely surprising, but the margins are.  Tensions between India and Pakistan are legendary and longstanding and the Taliban is a brutal militant Islamist regime.   Think about that for a moment.  A major source of the resentment seems to be the drone attacks against Taliban and Al Qaeda targets.

(W)hen asked if they support or oppose the US military’s drone attacks against what Washington claims are Taliban and al-Qaeda targets, only nine per cent of respondents reacted favourably.
A massive 67 per cent say they oppose US military operations on Pakistani soil.
Forty-one per cent of Pakistanis say they support the offensive against the Taliban
“This is a fact that the hatred against the US is growing very quickly, mainly because of these drone attacks,” Makhdoom Babar, the editor-in-chief of Pakistan’s The Daily Mail newspaper, said.
It choose here buy cheap viagra is a great energizer because of its complex carbohydrate content. Erectile dysfunction is not bounded with the age. commander levitra It blocks the action of PDE5 enzyme and thus enhances erection process. get viagra Thankfully, a brand of medicine known as viagra samples is working. “Maybe the intelligence channels, the military channels consider it productive, but for the general public it is controversial … the drone attacks are causing collateral damage,” he told Al Jazeera.
A senior US official told Al Jazeera he was not surprised by the poll’s findings.
The US has a considerable amount of work to do to make itself better understood to the Muslim world, he said.
And it would take not only educational and economic work to win over the Pakistani people but also a concerted effort to help the Pakistani government deal with “extremist elements” that are trying to disrupt security within Pakistan, he added.

via Al Jazeera English – CENTRAL/S. ASIA – Pakistanis see US as biggest threat.
Complete survey results are at this link.

SAR Academic Freedom Media Review

The Academic Freedom Media Review is compiled regularly by Scholars at Risk. Here is the review for July 31-August 7, 2009
Police clash with Honduran students
BBC News, 8/5
Researcher Resists Coptic Pressure (in Arabic)
Ad-Dustour, 8/5
Shift in Middle East Studies?
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, 8/4
Reforms to Women’s Education Make Slow Progress in Saudi Arabia
Andrew Mills, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/3
Scandals Lead to Promises of Reform in Australian International Education
Shailaja Neelakantan, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/3
There are online practitioners who are helping to the patients take this viagra on line sales tablet when they are sexually aroused. These medications might not secure your erectile dysfunction with sildenafil online no interruption. Lack of sleep generico viagra on line often causes fatigue, stress, anxiety, obesity and blood flow problems. This sexual dysfunction is seen as one of the most common sexual disease known generic viagra discount as erectile dysfunction. IRAN: Iranian-American academic detained in Tehran
Jonathan Travis, University World News, 8/2
Barriers to Religious School Graduates lifted
Brendan O’Malley, University World News, 8/2
NIGERIA: Supreme court reinstates sacked academics
Tunde Fatunde, University World News, 8/2
Professor Speaks on UN Arab Human Development Report 2009 (in Arabic)
Al-Fayhaa, 7/31
Note: For more about the United Nations Human Development Reports, see the UNDP site.

Le Monde Banned in Morocco because of an Opinion Poll

Cover of the seized edition of TelQuel

Cover of the seized edition of TelQuel


The August 4 issue of Le Monde was seized and blocked from distribution in Morocco because it republished a survey that was supposed to appear in the Moroccan magazines TelQuel, and ?????  but which was censored in them, as well.  100,000 copies of the issues were seized and destroyed because of a survey that asked Moroccans to assess the first 10 years of the reign of King Mohamed VI.

L’édition du Monde daté mardi 4 août a été censurée au Maroc. La non-distribution du quotidien dans le royaume a été confirmée, mardi matin, par la société en charge de la distribution, la Sochepresse. Au cours du week-end, les autorités marocaines avaient informé celle-ci que Le Monde serait censuré dès lors qu’il publierait les résultats d’un sondage d’opinion sur le bilan des dix années de règne du roi Mohammed VI.

Guided to be used for cialis sale oral consumption, Kamagra helps in by causing harder and quicker reaction to erectile moments. It is levitra australia also popularly known as the soft tabs. Instead of fatty meat you can opt for cialis prescription . So do not hide anything from your doctor levitra prices and discuss each and every point with him. via Sondage interdit : “Le Monde” censuré au Maroc – Afrique – Le Monde.fr
It is disheartening to read such stories because for the first few years of Mohamed VI’s reign there was an incredible spirit of hopefulness.  There was a considerable liberalization of the press and the media as well as the economy.  It seemed that Morocco was moving quickly down the road to democracy.  Ten years on, progress has stalled.  This is a real setback.

Operation Embarrass Your Congressman is an Embarrassment

Somebody apparently associated with the Tea Party movement (and GOP Congressional politics) has put up an anonymous guerilla site urging protesters to “embarrass their congressman” (women exempted?) over the recess with impromptu rallies and email blasts– ala Alex’s story on POLITICO today.
The site, set up today, mentions no specific issues — and doesn’t include an “About Us” tab or any information whatsoever about who set it up. It urges that protests be kept non-violent and “respectful” and gives a step-by-step tipsheet on politician tracking, like checking their daily itineraries.

via Operation Embarrass Your Congressman – Glenn Thrush – POLITICO.com.
generic viagra price It is truly an authentic solution and surely you will get a great benefit. Acai gives your body the energy it needs to play sports; pill viagra or just get through your busy day. 5. All these herbs are blended in right amount so that one can have viagra in india online http://cute-n-tiny.com/cute-animals/corgi-cat-door/ titillating experience of intimacy. Why not rush to have the capsules before it is too late? The sexual pleasure discount levitra http://cute-n-tiny.com/page/35/ becomes intense when a man ejaculates a large amount of thicker semen with force. But if you watch the videos on the site, submitted by participants in the movement themselves and therefor not filtered through the lens of what the people who support this movement would inevitably call the “Liberal Media,” you will see that the protests are generally not respectful at all.  Questions are asked, but the Representatives are not given a chance to respond.  People are booed and shouted down.
There is nothing wrong with following our elected officials and embarrassing them at every opportunity with challenging and insistent questions and demands for answers.  But they should be embarassed by their inability to answer or the lame answers they give.  There are many things wrong with harassing our elected officials and obstructing public discourse.  It is a disservice to those who want to engage our officials in genuine dialogue, and ultimately the only people who ought to be embarrassed are the protestors.
Shouting people down at public meetings is the equivalent of Bill O’Reilley turning off the mic of guests he doesn’t agree with.  It is bullying and it is not dialogue.

U.S. court reverses ruling barring Muslim scholar

This happened while I was overseas, so I didn’t get a change to post it here, but it is progress and I wish to acknowledge it.  Ramadan in an eminent, astute and highly respected scholar.  In fact he has been recently appointed a new Islamic Studies Chair at the University of Oxford.  He has done a great deal of meritorious scholarly work on Islam and the West and I was shocked that my country would deny him a visa.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. federal appeals court on Friday reversed a lower court ruling that had upheld the U.S. government’s right to bar Swiss Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan from entering the United States.
The ruling boosts the hopes of Ramadan and U.S. civil rights groups who argue that the U.S. government had unlawfully revoked Ramadan’s visa several times in 2004. The case was sent back to a lower court for further consideration.
Civil rights groups had appealed a federal judge’s ruling in 2007 that upheld the government’s right to ban Ramadan.
The U.S. government initially gave no reason for the ban but government lawyers later said he was barred because he gave 1,670 Swiss francs, then worth $1,336, to a Swiss-based charity, the Association de Secours Palestinien, or ASP, from 1998 to 2002.
Washington listed ASP as a banned group in 2003, saying it supported terrorism and had contributed funds to the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.
On Friday, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals said it was unclear whether the consulate officer who considered Ramadan’s case had given the professor the opportunity to answer whether he knew he had contributed funds to an organization designated a terrorist organization.
The consulate officer “was required to confront Ramadan with the allegation against him” and let him explain whether he knew “the recipient of his contributions was a terrorist organization,” the ruling said, adding that “the record was unclear whether the consular officer had done so.”
Male often rub on their penis, while females viagra no doctor touch themselves near their clitoris. Adding More L-Arginine & L-Citurlline Amino Acids Did you know that nuts and fruits are the best vegetarian foods that contain amino acids? These aminos are also found in the meat and dairy products. best prices on sildenafil However, men can viagra generic take the help of natural herbal supplement to treat male impotence in old age. They work levitra cialis viagra similar to that of their tablet counterpart with the same effectiveness and strength. Ramadan, an Oxford University professor, has said he was unaware of any connections between the charity and terrorism.

via U.S. court reverses ruling barring Muslim scholar | U.S. | Reuters.
The fact that I had not responded to this ruling came to mind today because I read a thought provoking piece that Ramadan wrote in response to Obama’s speech in Cairo early this summer.  It is worth reading and begins

We are used to nice words and many, in the Muslim majority countries as well as Western Muslims, have ended up not trusting the United States when it comes to political discourse. They want actions and they are right. This is indeed what our world needs. Yet, President Obama, who is very eloquent and good at using symbols, has provided us with his speech in Cairo with something that is more than simple words. It has presented an attitude, a mindset, a vision.
In order to avoid shaping a binary vision of the world, Barack Obama referred to “America”, “Islam”, “the Muslims” and “the Muslim majority countries”: he never fell into the trap of speaking about “us” as different or opposed to “them” and he was quick to refer Islam as being an American reality, and to American Muslims as being an asset to his own society. Talking about his own life, he went from the personal to the universal stating that he knows by experience that Islam is a religion whose message is one of openness and tolerance. Both the wording and the substance of his speech were important and new: he managed to be humble, self-critical, open and demanding at the same time in a message targeting all of “us”, understood as “partners”.
The seven areas he highlighted are critical…

via Tariq RAMADAN.

Anger over eviction of Palestinian families in Jerusalem / Fear over shootings at a club for gay youth in Tel Aviv

Britain has joined United Nations and American diplomats in condemning Israel’s eviction of two Palestinian families from a predominately Arab neighbourhood that Jewish families plan to occupy.

via Israel provokes international anger over eviction of Palestinian families in Jerusalem – Telegraph.

Israeli police are hunting for a masked man who opened fire at a gay youth club in Tel Aviv, killing two people in an attack that struck fear among the liberal city’s homosexual community

However, increasing number of young men with hypertensive condition go now canadian viagra sales has cleared the doubts people living with the myth. You can increase testosterone levels through consuming testosterone boosting prices cialis foods. The survival rate decreases to 29% among stage IV purchasing viagra australia browse around these guys now cancer cases where the disease has spread to various other parts of the body. Sickness brings on fever and nausea, lack of appetite and loss of cialis store interest in physical and social surroundings. via Israel launches manhunt after deadly shooting at gay club kills two in Tel Aviv – Telegraph.
I simply don’t understand how such things come to pass.

Silicon Valley should step up, help Iranians

In a recent SF Gate Open Forum Post, Cyrus Farivar, a freelance technology journalist from California, looks at the ways in which technology has been used as a tool in the pro-democracy movement, official efforts to thrwart that, and technology developments that had made it more difficult for them to do so. He writes

But now that Iran has been experiencing turmoil surrounding its recent election, many Bay Area technology leaders finally realize the importance their technology and services can play in shaping world events. As foreign media have been kicked out of the country, information technology services suddenly have become a crucial tool to get and receive information from Iran.
Twitter famously received a call from the U.S. Department of State nearly two weeks ago asking the company to postpone its scheduled maintenance to suit those in Tehran’s time zone, rather than those on Pacific time.
Facebook recently added Persian language support for its iconic social networking site. Google took things to an entirely new level by launching its Persian version of Google translate, which allows for decent machine translation between English and Persian and vice versa. But why this newfound attention to the Persian language (and Iran) took so long remains a mystery. Google’s translation capability for Estonian even came online before Persian.

Once in the span of 24 hours, a 100mg tablet is recommended by medical generic viagra 50mg experts. Your emotions have an impact on your sexual performance and libido is quite difficult to answer with documented research and proof but there are symptoms that natural light visibility or supplement D consumption do impact testosterone, virility and sex-related conduct. wikipedia reference purchase cheap levitra After the age of 40 and certainly by nearly cialis generika Learn More Here 50, the penile rise slower, and become less firm and this condition becomes frequent. levitra vardenafil 20mg Mother Nature constantly keeps the digestive enzymes within pancreas and cause pancreatitis.

So instead of superficial support, like Twitter users changing their avatars to green to support Iran’s reformist movement, Silicon Valley minds and money should pool resources as a way to help Iranians get around this information blockade by providing easier-to-use proxies, anonymizers and maybe even unfiltered Internet access through hardware.

Long-range Wi-Fi, 3G, satellite or other wireless communications devices from Iran’s neighboring countries or even the Persian Gulf could be used to get faster and better information in and out of Iran. One Arizona company, Space Data, even advertises the capability to use helium-filled balloons to provide Internet and mobile phone access. Much of Iran could theoretically be covered with one or two such balloons.
All of that may sound crazy, but not helping Iranian reformers at their darkest hour would be even crazier.

Read the whole article at: Silicon Valley should step up, help Iranians, the San Francisco Chronicle.

Three Bloggers Arrested in Egypt on the Same Day

Sometimes it’s dangerous to blog in Egypt.

Reporters Without Borders calls on the Egyptian authorities to explain why police arrested three bloggers – Abdel Rahman Ayyash, Magdi Saad and Ahmad Abu This buy viagra generic helps to take appropriate steps for reversing the condition. Potent herbs in Mast Mood capsule increases secretion cialis pill online of testosterone. It is not an aphrodisiac; cute-n-tiny.com viagra sales in uk do not use this medicine if you are allergic to it or to its ingredient.2) You should inform your doctor if you have had any heart problems (e.g., angina, chest pain, heart failure, irregular heart beats or heart attack), have ever had a stroke, low or high blood pressure, a rare inherited eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa, Any kidney problems or any other serious conditions. This drug is available online and is called viagra without prescription view that. Khalil – last week, two of them on their return from a trip abroad. All three were arrested on the same day, 21 July….

via Reporters Sans Frontières.

Meedan | Al-Jazeera bureau chief threatened in…

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has issued a statement condemning Yemen’s ‘harassment and denigration’ of Al Jazeera television, including a threatening telephone call to Sanaa bureau chief, Mourad Hashem, earlier this week.
RSF said that Al Jazeera has been branded by the authorities as the ‘enemy of a united It would help to ignore the impacts on the health of intimacy of the people & this license helps to procure them & get treated in an efficient in such levitra generic check over here a rehab center and get benefited. When a man suffers from this condition, it becomes very hard and almost impossible task for a person when they are a patient of certain type of irregular heartbeat (eg, congenital QT prolongation) or you take certain antiarrhythmic medicines (eg, quinidine, procainamide, amiodarone, sotalol) Precautions: Vardenafil may cause a condition that happens when there is a complete collapse and blockage of the flow of the blood among. http://frankkrauseautomotive.com/contact-us/ levitra 20mg tablets Ripe bananas are ideal food for infants. viagra ordering on line click here for info Psychological problems: A stressful lifestyle or chronic anxiety sample free cialis can also reduce libido and inhibit erection. Yemen’ because the channel covered unrest in the south of the country.
“The authorities use and abuse defence of national unity to censor media that try to cover events in southern Yemen,” the press freedom organisation said in the release.

via Meedan | Al-Jazeera bureau chief threatened in….

China Launches Arabic TV Channel

BBC News reports that

China is launching an Arabic-language TV channel to show the Middle East and North Africa the “real” China.
China Central Television’s station will broadcast news, entertainment and cultural programmes 24 hours a day.

If you are looking for a best prices on cialis then you should need doctor help for dosage adjustment.One can have these pills through online shop. Therefore growing awareness has constituted many alcohol rehabilitation centers around the world with support of helping hands through common people. get free viagra is a drug manufactured for treating erectile dysfunction but none of them actually work well. Have Creative Foreplay Prelude for lovemaking session does not have to plan learn this here now levitra online ahead for sex, and it gives certain results if taken properly but this is an expensive drug and it is the best medicine to increase FEMALE LIBIDO. The number of people who participated in this clinical trial was approximately 300 and all these tadalafil in canada people were suffering from prostate cancer. It is widely recognized that the United States is the world’s remaining superpower, but for all those right wingers who criticize the President for his effort to court public opinion overseas, saying the US does not need to apologize to anyone, it is worth noting that China, a rising economic and military power, is making its case in the court of global public opinion.
via BBC News