An Air Canada Flagging The Star did cover the story as well as OMNI News. This was done primarily to pressure Air Canada to repond to my charges and build up a certain public awareness. After the OMNI segment aired Air Canada immediately sent me their ``official response`` which denied the flagging. Later, a politican who did some digging around on my behalf actually corroborated the flagging and exposed the cover-up. I`m in the process of determining who placed the flag on me in the first place and will, at that point, determine what action to take.

Know Your Enemy Enjoyed your piece Shandana...now, let`s hear that one about the mullah and the goat!

Razia Bondrey Bhatti: A Woman of Courage I had the privilege of working for Newsline with Razia and company...it was a wonderful experience working with an editor who carried her professional integrity with such pride and joy.

A Student Remembers a Great Teacher Omar,
Enjoyed your piece. I was fortunate enough to hear Said speak in 1997...and as you say ``the audience [was] spellbound – to say the least – by this dapper Jerusalem-born Palestinian Christian.`` Said commanded this respect for believing that the ``two communities (Arabs and Jews) must be seen as equal to each other in rights and expectations``. He was sought for his insight and hated for his honest eloquence. Qualities which no present day leader can claim to possess.
Shahid

Wasim Akram: A Tribute As headlined in a British paper-
``The Left Hand of God``.

Modern Armies and Their Invincible Plans enjoyed it...a hint of JG Ballard?

Many Questions, No Answers just to recap...
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No country can democratise another
By forgetting its own history, America risks turning those who might have been friends of democracy in Iraq into enemies

Benjamin Barber
Sunday June 29, 2003
The Observer

Can the West democratise the Middle East? Clearly, the answer is no. But whether the Middle East can become democratic is a very different question.

The notion that any country can democratise any other country leads us to misunderstand the fundamental concept of democracy building and misread our own history in Britain or America, where the struggle for democracy was a long, slow and internal: a struggle in which people over centuries seized their own rights, and not one in which overnight a foreign invading army somehow liberated us from external conquerors and made us free.

Wars fought even in the name of noble objectives create not democracy but anarchy. Any social scientist will tell you that anarchy is the condition in which tyranny breeds. Where you have previously had a secular tyranny like in Iraq, you might get a theocratic tyranny. In places like Afghanistan where you have had a theocratic tyranny, you may get a warlord tyranny.

Left to its own devices, Iran is far more likely to achieve democracy, though slowly, than Iraq where it has been imposed from the outside. Democracy comes bottom up and not top down.

Recent events show therefore that ``preventative democracy`` is a better answer to terrorism than preventative war, but for ``preventative democracy`` to work we must understand the nature of democracy. By failing to do so, America has turned what might have been friends of the democratic process in Iraq into humiliated and vengeful enemies of the US military.

The US and British Governments seemed to imply that if you liquidated the Ba`athist dictatorship, automatically in its place would appear overnight a democracy, as if the only thing that stood between Iraqi society and democracy was the presence of a dictator.

American history from 1776-1789 and through the civil war shows the 200 hundred years it took to achieve an insufficient democracy in the United States. Our leaders would do well to first read our own history prior to talking about having to democratise other people. You don`t start with a Parliament, a Bill of Rights, a constitution, a free press and an independent judiciary, but with citizenship, education and civic institutions in the neighbourhood. When Alex de Tocqueville toured America in the 1830s, he found much that was wrong, but was pleased that liberty was local and started with civic institutions.

Real democracy building requires a concentration on education, a fact recognised in the formative years of the US when John Adams of Massachusetts agreed with Thomas Jefferson of Virginia that the constitution would not work without state education for all who would be citizens. In the formative years of the United States, If America had understood this it would have put its tanks not in front of the Iraqi Energy Ministry but the schools and libraries.

The most militant and adversarial Islamic sect has not hesitated to create Wahhabi schools in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to educate 40,000 children of Afghani refugees. They understand the value of schools, even where hate is the pedagogy. We`ve forgotten. American largesse is spent on training the Pakistani military at the same time as we`re neglecting to help develop the indigenous schools system.

But, though we must support civil society, outside powers cannot prescribe a democratic formula. Democratisation has taken many different paths, from Anglo-American common law to Continental Roman law; from the emphasis in Switzerland on communal freedom with American emphasis on individual freedom. When it comes to the rest of the world, we think it`s got to be done the American way.

We Fed-exed the Afghanis the Bill of Rights rather than seeing the need for democracy to develop that accommodates the local history and culture. The only thing that we can export from our own experience is the heterogeneity of that experience. Even today in Afghanistan the one democratic institution that looks like it could work is the grand council, or Loya Jirga, the only genuinely indigenous institution. If democracy is exogenous it cannot take root and will be blown away by the first gale, as in Haiti where there was a short-lived experiment with democracy America style.

Democracy means the right of people to make mistakes on the way to reclaim their own liberty. When France thought, along with the US and Britain, that the Algerians had made a mistake in voting in the 1991 primary elections for a relatively modest Islamic party in conjunction with the Algerian military they withdrew the democratic mandate. The resultant ten years of civil war, terrorism and the death of the middle class were far worse than if the electoral results had been supported.

Finally, democracies must be allowed to make fundamental political and economic decisions. The US with the complicity of Britain is making all of the vital decisions that will determine the future shape of Iraqi society before there is a government to either approve or disapprove of the decision. They have announced that there will be a privatised media, a privatised energy industry, an independent judiciary, a Bill of Rights and that Ba`athists will be persona non grata in future governments.

These may be prudent and wise decisions but they are not decisions for the United States to make. By making these sweeping changes on the ground, the fundamental sovereign decisions of an Iraqi regime have been removed. Even if in a couple of years Iraq achieves some form of minimalist democracy, the government will have nothing to do but decide the detail of how to apply the blueprints dreamt up in Washington. Democracy that empowers people is an apt answer to terrorism, which is an ideology of the powerless, but that democracy must be real.

Dr Benjamin Barber is a former advisor to President Clinton and author of Jihad versus McWorld and Fear`s Empire (forthcoming this summer). This article is extracted from his Foreign Policy Centre/Civility lecture `Can the west promote democracy in the Middle East` at the London School of Economics last week.

Qui a Tui Daniel Pearl Copied below is a seemingly more intellegent review.
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Iqbal Akhund, Dawn

Prolific writer, political activist and something of a cult figure in French leftist circles, Bernard-Henri Levy was launched on his career in the 70s by his critical reporting of Pakistan`s Bangladesh operation. He has since written some two dozen books on philosophy, politics, art, etc and also a couple of novels. His latest book (available at present only in French) is again about Pakistan.

Its theme is that America made ``a singular and historic miscalculation`` in giving priority to Iraq, a country already largely disarmed and ruled by a waning dictatorship, whereas it is in the ``secret depths of Pakistani cities that traffic in nuclear know-how goes on and terrifying schemes are being plotted for tomorrow``. That instead, America has recruited this very Pakistan in the war against terrorism is an act of ``supreme derision``!

Pre-empting a primary criticism, Henri-Levy describes his inquest into Daniel Pearl`s murder as a `novelquest` for while the book is based, he claims, on `nothing but the facts` where facts were unavailable, he has relied on imagination. The character of his imagination can be judged from the following:

``Daniel would have said to the Yemeni that he was too close, that was not the way one filmed, that he would get a beginner`s fish-eye effect: but he realizes that this is not the moment for giving advice.``

This is the author`s fancy of what was running through Daniel Pearl`s mind as a Yemeni executioner prepares to cut his throat while another is setting up a camera to film the event!

Where both facts and imagination fail, Levy resorts to assertion. Almost all his most categorical affirmations are based on little more than his own conviction. ``It is my belief. I am persuaded. I am prepared to bet`` and so forth.

Thus: ``I bet that Daniel Pearl was gathering proofs of Pakistan`s collusion with the great rogue states and terrorist networks of the planet.``

``It is my hypothesis that Pakistan is playing a double game, posing as a good ally of the United States while its prestigious scientists engage in the most fearsome operation of nuclear proliferation``.

``I affirm that of all the rogue states, the biggest rogue state today is Pakistan.``

The evidence he cites for such conclusions comes invariably from unnamed sources: a ``Deep Throat`` whose real identity, he says, he cannot reveal; an anonymous policeman whom he calls `Tariq`; and of course Indian police and intelligence officials. As to these, he concedes that India (``a country where, after Pakistan, I feel so marvelously well``) would have an interest in vilifying enemy Pakistan.

But having made this show of objectivity, he accepts as authentic whatever the Indians put before him, including a diary that Pearl`s murderer Shaikh Omar is supposed to have written during his six years in Indian jail - never mind that the handwriting abruptly changes in the middle of the document and that it is written in language more common to subcontinental policemen than to the student of an English public school (for example, `female partner` for girl friend). Yes, he says, the diary could have been fabricated by the Indian police. ``But no, I don`t believe that to be the case.``

What has he discovered from these sources and on the basis of his own hunches and presumptions about who killed Daniel Pearl and why? [Pearl] was kidnapped and assassinated by Islamist groups manipulated by a fringe group of [intelligence] officials, the most radical, most violent and anti-American of the factions that are contesting the control of the services... The murder was a crime of state, willed and covered by the Pakistani state.

`Tariq` informs him that the accused murderer, Shaikh Omar is in fact ISI`s man. On the same Tariq`s say-so, Levy hints that President Musharraf himself may have had a role in the affair. Either that, he says, or the general himself is being manipulated and undermined by his intelligence services, by the state within the Pakistan state. Anyway Bernard Henri Levy has it on good authority - namely Indian intelligence officials, The Times of India, etc - that the ISI had a hand indeed in the destruction of New York`s twin towers! Pearl was on to all this - all this that the FBI, the CIA and everyone else had somehow managed to miss - and therefore had to be killed. But alas! Levy cannot produce any evidence; ``Witnesses are rare,`` he admits, ``if any exist, they remain silent or disinform.``

The book is written by someone who makes no bones about his dislike of Pakistan, (`a nest of vipers, a powder-keg` etc) and of Pakistanis. Even those who speak in liberal, pro-western terms, are not to be trusted: ``How to know in this country really who is who? How to be certain that these people are not playing a double or triple game?`` One, if not the only, reason for Bernard- Henri Levy`s fear and hatred of Pakistan ``a country where being American is as great a sin as being Jewish``, undoubtedly is that like Daniel Pearl, Bernard-Henri Levy is Jewish.

There is a great deal in the book on the matter of Pearl`s Jewishness, on anti-Semitism, and also what he calls neo-antisemitism. The neo-antisemite, he says bitterly, is one for whom Israel`s name is associated with war crimes, the massacre of Palestinians, political exploitation of the holocaust and so forth, in other words, anyone who is critical of Israel. His `unshakable` devotion to Israel is undoubtedly, another reason for his virulence towards Pakistan in whose nuclear capability he sees a great danger to Israel. He talks about this to Sharon who laughs off Levy`s question whether Israel might do an `Osirak` on Pakistan. However he reassures Levy that the location of Pakistan`s nuclear war-heads is known to the `international intelligence community`; if any is moved by so much as a millimetre ``we shall know what to do``.

The book has made a great stir in French media who, by and large, have tended to accept without question the mishmash of half-truths and conjecture, dogmatic assertion and outright untruth of which it is composed. This may seem shocking to Pakistanis, for the book is unabashedly a `hatchet job` on Pakistan.

But given the sort of headlines that Pakistan has been making in recent years, about blasphemy trials and honour killings, high-level corruption and low-level politics, one should not be surprised that people abroad, and particularly in the West, have become predisposed to believe the worst about our country.

Of Vista Points and Immortality Monis, nice piece of writing...you did Youngblood proud!