Sierra Leone: President Threatens to Declare Emergency

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Sierra Leone leader warns of possible state of emergency

Source: CNN.

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (Reuters) -- Sierra Leone's President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah has warned he could declare a state of emergency across the former British colony if violence ahead of next month's presidential run-off vote worsens.

Police declared a curfew in the eastern border region with Liberia on Monday, a center of the illegal diamond mining trade which fueled a 1991-2002 civil war, after dispersing more than a thousand demonstrators from rival political groups.

The unrest spread to the suburbs of the capital Freetown late on Monday, where supporters of the ruling Sierra Leone People's Party and the opposition All People's Congress took to the streets with machetes, local radio said.

U.N. sources said one person was believed to have been killed in the violence.

"The people of this country have suffered long enough," Kabbah said in an address broadcast late on Monday.

"I'm deeply distressed by events at the weekend. ... From henceforth the government shall not hesitate to declare a state of emergency," he said.

The polls in the West African country are the first since United Nations peacekeepers left two years ago following the civil war, a brutal conflict in which children were drugged and forced to fight and civilians were mutilated with machetes.

The British army has retrained Sierra Leone's armed forces and the security situation is much improved, but corruption among politicians -- one of the root causes of the war -- is rampant and the country remains mired in poverty.

Main opposition candidate Ernest Bai Koroma of the APC won 44 percent of the vote in the August 11 first round, followed by Vice President Soloman Berewa of the SLPP on 38 percent.

Koroma is being backed in the run-off by the third-placed candidate Charles Margai, who polled 14 percent.

Deep fault lines in the country have resurfaced during the polls, with the APC winning strong support among the northern ethnic Temne and Limba groups but the SLPP backed by the southern Mende population.

With about 100,000 votes separating Koroma and Berewa in the first round, the run-off will depend largely on whether Margai, who took over 250,000 votes, can convince his southern Mende heartland to switch to the northern-based APC.

Analysts say that means ethnic politics are likely to play a role in campaigning but note that the unrest so far has been relatively minor and localized.

Sierra Leone's Independent Media Commission has already issued warnings to two radio stations -- one owned by the SLPP, the other by the APC -- for broadcasting programs liable to stir unrest.

"Several people within the community are perturbed by the incitative statements from the two radio stations," Commissioner Bernadette Cole told Reuters. "If left unchecked their activities may lead to chaos, mayhem and public disorder."

"Members of the Security Council called on leaders of all parties and their followers ... to respect the results of the elections as they are confirmed and to resolve any disputes through exclusively peaceful and legal channels," the U.N. Security Council said in a statement.

Don't Miss
Run-off in Sierra Leone presidential poll.

Duncan Hunter—The Class of Reagan

Source: The Patriot Post: Digest. This is a copy of the Perspective section of the Patriot Post Digest. Please visit the PatriotPost to stay informed of all things Conservative, republic, and constitutional. You may also sign up for e-mail deliveries!

“If men of wisdom and knowledge... and true republican simplicity of manners... are chosen to fill the seats of government, we may expect that our affairs will rest on a solid and permanent foundation.” —Samuel Adams

PATRIOT PERSPECTIVE

The consensus among the chattering class is that this presidential cycle features no clear heir to the Reagan mantle. Yet of the declared candidates, conservatives outnumber the media-dubbed triumvirate of Giuliani, McCain and Romney. Most notable among them is Duncan Hunter, the California representative who hails from The Gipper’s lucky city of San Diego.

Hunter earned his congressional seat in 1980, in a 2-to-1 Democrat-dominated district. He did so with a winning combination of determination, shoe leather, integrity and a clear conservative philosophy as espoused by GOP presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. Certain sectors of the San Diego establishment have never forgiven Hunter for ousting nine-term Demo Rep. Lionel Van Deerlin, now a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Hunter is a decorated Vietnam veteran who served with the 173rd Airborne Division and the 75th Army Rangers. After returning home, he attended law school and opened offices in San Diego’s Hispanic Barrio Logan, often offering legal services at no charge. Last October, before the Republican congressional losses, Hunter announced his simultaneous retirement from Congress and his presidential candidacy. In other words, he is serious about this campaign.

The National Journal recently assessed political placement of declared presidential candidates based on a gamut of congressional votes. While this obviously applies only to legislators, Hunter achieved the most conservative score—82.5 of a possible 99—edging Sam Brownback. Both are well ahead of the rest of the pack. Indeed, Hunter has a lengthy list of conservative bona fides.

Most notably, in more than two decades on the House Armed Services Committee, where he is the former chairman and current ranking member, Hunter steadfastly advocated a victory strategy in both the Cold War and the global war with Jihadistan. He also did much to blunt the dismantling of the U.S. military by Bill Clinton. As chairman of Armed Services, Hunter oversaw the nation’s $532-billion defense budget in the first years of America’s war on Islamic terrorism.

On the immigration front, he sponsored the controversial Secure Fence Act for improved border control and was personally responsible for 59 miles of border fencing now in place along San Diego County’s border with Mexico.

When it comes to constitutional issues, he does not subscribe to the adulterated “Living Constitution” oft-referenced by the Left. Instead, he is a constitutional constructionist and abides by the letter of the Constitution he has sworn to uphold.

Hunter’s presidential bid is centered on three core national-security principles: Effective prosecution of the campaign against jihadi terrorism, strict border and immigration enforcement and a focus on our own economic security in the global economy.

What kind of campaign must the GOP wage to win? Top presidential contenders among the Democrats have over twice the money and nearly twice the donors of the Republicans’ big three. Moreover, if Hillary wins the Demo primary, she will decline federal matching funds—freeing herself of the restrictions attached to those funds.

A Republican ticket will need a lot of bang for the buck, cutting a significant swath into the Democrats’ base—without losses on the right. In his Demo-dominated district, Hunter has proven he can win Democrats’ votes without waffling on conservative principles.

In the contests where he has actively campaigned, Hunter has performed best on that measure.

In the March South Carolina contest, he drew to a statistical tie, at 22 percent each, with John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. “We were outspent 10 to 1,” he remarked, going against an “army of consultants.” Running the effort was his son, a Marine captain and OIF veteran. Of this, candidate Hunter quipped, “You know, that’s a pretty good match-up: one Marine versus 550 consultants. We did have the advantage.”

Every characteristic touted as a distinguisher for another candidate is one Hunter also demonstrates. He combines the military service and acumen of McCain with the border-security stances of Tom Tancredo, he’s been a consistent defender of human life and traditional families in law and he has a firm grasp of the principles of constitutional law. He has as much or more experience as a legislator than most of his primary contenders.

A true Patriot, Hunter proclaims, “America is a great nation because America is a good nation. God still loves this nation. We are still a people of character and strength and kindness. And so with faith in God, with confidence in the goodness of the American people, let’s win this race for the United States presidency.”

A veteran of the 1980 congressional “Class of Reagan,” Duncan Hunter is a standout worthy of serious consideration by conservative voters, not only because of his aforementioned qualifications, but because one has to spend only a minute with him to know what achievement he counts above all others—his 33 years of marriage to his wife, Lynne, and the two sons and four grandchildren that are the product of that marriage. Duncan is a family man above all.

(For a brief bio of Hunter and his current ratings by conservative organizations, as well as bios and ratings for other GOP candidates, link to The Patriot’s candidate profile page.)

Quote of the week
“One thing that [Iraqi war theater commander Gen. David Petraeus] reminded us was, this [war] is a test of wills, and he admonished us... that what we say to the world, to our adversaries and our allies, is listened to by the other side... It must come as a shock to al-Qa’ida leaders to have an aide come into their safe house and tell them that Senator [Harry] Reid has declared that, in fact, they are winning and the war is lost. I think it’s highly irresponsible for the leader of the U.S. Senate to have said that and, just speaking for myself as the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, I think that the leader of the Senate should step down from that position.” —Congressman Duncan Hunter, California Republican, on Wednesday, after Gen. Petraeus’ closed-door congressional briefing sessions.

The Mainstream Media: Islamist Facilitators

Reprinted with permission by FamilySecurityMatters.org.
Author: M. Zuhdi Jasser
Source: The Family Security Foundation, Inc.
Date: April 19, 2007

In this riveting, damning exposé by FSM Contributing Editor M. Zuhdi Jasser, the mainstream media is identified as one of the most significant reasons why moderate Muslim voices are utterly silenced in America. You won’t want to take this outrage sitting down!The PBS censorship of Islam vs. Islamists highlights one of the major obstacles to hearing the Moderate Muslim Voice.

By M. Zuhdi Jasser.

Dennis Wagner of the Arizona Republic broke the story on April 10, 2007 about PBS’s censorship of the documentary, Islam vs. Islamists from its America at a Crossroads series which debuted this week. The film’s producers, Frank Gaffney, Alex Alexiev and the veteran filmmaker, Martyn Burke of ABG Films, Inc. have since presented in shocking detail their painful protracted experiences trying to navigate the censors at PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which funded the film with $675,000 of the taxpayers’ monies but now has chosen to shelve it. In just the last week of public debate, there has been a firestorm of outcry from the public who are demanding that oppressive methods of editorial content control by power brokers at PBS be investigated and the real story behind the shelving of Islam vs. Islamists be exposed. PBS’s exploitation of the public dime and the public airwaves for the narrow point of view of the Islamist sympathizers with the exclusion of the anti-Islamist Muslims is just now beginning to be understood.

As one of the subjects of the documentary, I was able to experience first-hand the professionalism and in-depth journalistic standards of veteran filmmaker, Martyn Burke, and his first-class team of consummate professionals. It was refreshing to have a documentary set out objectively to look into the deep-seated internal struggles of anti-Islamist Muslims like myself. Our work at the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) here in Phoenix has been riddled with continual blowback and resistance in many forms from the power structure of the activist Muslim community in the Phoenix Valley . The Valley Council of Imams, the local Muslim Voice newspaper, and organizations like CAIR-AZ have provided a laboratory of typical Islamist responses to an American organization of Muslims, like AIFD, who are trying to rescue spiritual Islam from the death grip of Islamists—Islam vs. Islamists. I do this out of love for my faith and its spiritual path to the God of Abraham in order to free it from the corruption of the political imam which has become so ubiquitous.

I have previously discussed the harm of our government’s enabling of Islamists (like CAIR, MPAC, MAS, MSA, or ISNA) in the United States and how the governmental endorsement of Islamists publicly empowers them and allows them to dodge their responsibility of countering Islamism as an ideology. This order of magnitude is greater in impact when it concerns the media’s inability to wage the debate of the “struggle for the soul of Islam”. Stories about Islam and Muslims have been more and more ubiquitous since 9-11 and now are actually commonplace. Yet, the actual debate within the Muslim community has barely begun. Where’s the disconnect? Look no further than the Islamist enablers in the media.

When so many ask across the nation, “where are the moderate voices of Islam?”, one cannot help lately but exclaim that they are being suffocated by misguided political correctness and by Islamist influence within mainstream media and government. The PBS censorship of the documentary, Islam vs. Islamists, highlights one of the best examples to date of the symbiosis of both government complicity and media complicity with the Islamist ideology.

The recent RAND corporation research project highlighting the dire need to Build Moderate Muslim Networks in this new global “long war” against militant Islamism and its ideological siblings will never come to fruition with the current blinded pro-Islamist mainstream media approach. The mainstream media (MSM) is apparently blind to the real ideology of Islamism and they allow Islamists to hide their theocracy behind minority politics. The MSM not only avoids the free flow of ideas within the Muslim community, it effectively allows the Islamists completely to stifle any and all debate which would have allowed Muslims to question those in positions of authority within the Islamic community.

It is time for the MSM to stop protecting Muslims from one another and to stop stifling the debate many anti-Islamist Muslims would like to wage against leading Islamists. If Muslims are going to form a public expression of Islam which is reconciled with western democracies which separate religion and government, this debate against Islamism needs yet to begin, let alone blossom into cultural change for Muslims.

Islamists fear nothing more than credible and genuine debate against the core political ideology of Islamism from pious anti-Islamist Muslims. With an ideological counter from anti-Islamist Muslims- the Islamist emperor “has no clothes”. At every level, they are using America ’s naïveté about Islam in order to continue their theft of Islam for the political agenda of Islamism. The Islamists know that anti-Islamist Muslims rob them of their minority trump card of Islamophobia and force them to come to terms with the anti-freedom, and anti-liberty and anti-pluralistic ideology of Islamism. Anti-Islamist, pro-Islamic Muslims expose the real motives of Islamists—which is the exploitation of the spiritual path of Islam for political and governmental power and coercion.

The MSM would prefer to facilitate the current Islamist organizations and Islamist imams. Why? It could be a fear of litigation, minority victim politics, or simple ignorance regarding the goals of Islamism. As in the case with PBS, it could also be the internal influence and infiltration of Islamists within the media and government who will go to great lengths to suffocate the opinions of anti-Islamists, especially anti-Islamist Muslims.

The PBS/CPB censorship of Islam vs. Islamists exemplifies the dire need to begin to educate many in the MSM of the ideological realities of the Islamists. They may protect Islamists blindly out of ignorance, fear, infiltration, or minority politics. But, at the end of the day, if the MSM editors understood the type of society the protected Islamists would create if they became a majority, their support would vanish. Feminists, social liberals, and those that would separate religion from government would be entirely ignored under Islamist control. Just ask the feminists what type of equality they have in many Islamist controlled mosques around the country.

It is interesting that even in the recent April 18 New York Times, Virginia Heffernan appropriately critiques the vacuous nature of Robert McNeil’s documentary, “The Muslim Americans”. McNeil’s documentary which did conveniently make the cut of the Crossroads series, turned out to be a puff-piece for political correctness with no insight into Islamist ideologies and its danger to America . The question remains whether epiphanies like Heffernan’s in the Times about McNeil’s piece will translate into systemic changes in the approach of the MSM toward Islamists.

When will there be a change from coddling and enabling Islamists toward critical engagement of their deep ideological inconsistencies with Americanism? Thus far, investigative journalism, hard-hitting analysis, and identification of the clear and present danger of the Islamist ideological threat remains at best, a large blind spot and at worst an intentional omission.

Islamists sneak in their political agenda free of criticism from the MSM because they do it in the name of a religion. When moderate Muslims call them on their false representation of all Muslims and the disservice they do to the spiritual faith of Islam, the MSM so far chooses to shelve and ignore our efforts to be heard.

So the next time anyone asks, “where are the moderate voices of Islam?”, tell them that the main reason they are voices in the wilderness is that the mainstream media chooses to leave them in the wilderness and prevent them from seeing the light of day. In the PBS documentary it is only Muslims interviewed throughout the film—how could that be anti-Muslim? Simply put, PBS claims that the veteran filmmaker Martyn Burke was one-sided, but it appears that PBS and often the MSM is one-sided protecting Islamist leadership from their most effective detractors—anti-Islamist Muslim moderates.

Borrowing on the old cliché of a tree falling in a forest, if Muslims speak out against Islamists but remain unheard (in the PBS forest), did they speak out at all? Without regular opportunities in the media and government for anti-Islamist Muslims to speak out, America will never know that they ever did. Without being heard the moderate voices will be as if they never existed. Without hearing the moderate voice, it is so much the easier for Islamists to continue toward their goal of political domination and demagoguery of the Muslim community and, ultimately, of America itself.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor M. Zuhdi Jasser is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander and the Chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix , Arizona . He can be reached at Zuhdi@aifdemocracy.org.

© 2003-2007 FamilySecurityMatters.org All Rights Reserved

If you are a reporter or producer who is interested in receiving more information about this writer or this article, please email your request to COY7m@aol.com.

Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of The Family Security Foundation, Inc.

Tokyo re-elects nationalist governor

Source: CNN.

April 8, 2007

TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Tokyo's outspoken nationalist governor was re-elected Sunday despite his waning popularity, signaling Japan's acceptance of its resurgent right wing.

Shintaro Ishihara, once seen as a contender for prime minister, is known for his criticism of China, North Korea, foreigners, immigrants, women -- and even the French language. He has ignited outrage by ordering public school teachers in Tokyo to sing Japan's national anthem at school functions or face punishment.

"Tokyo residents' good sense brought this result," a beaming Ishihara told supporters at campaign headquarters after Japanese media reported he was certain to win citing exit polls, securing his third four-year term.

Ishihara, 74, received 50.1 percent of votes, while the runner-up was trailing at 30.3 percent with 99.22 percent of the total votes counted as of early Monday, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government said on its Web site.

Sunday's vote came ahead of nationwide parliamentary polls in July and was seen as a test of support for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, also known for his hawkish and nationalist stance.

Since taking office in September, Abe's conservative government has bolstered Japan's international military role and amended the constitution to require schools to teach patriotism.

Tokyo was among the 13 regions that held gubernatorial elections Sunday.

Three newcomers backed by Abe's ruling Liberal Democratic Party won, public broadcaster NHK said, giving a boost to Abe's popularity, which has been slipping recently.

Though he won, Ishihara's take in the vote was smaller than the 70 percent he garnered in 2003, underscoring voters' discontent amid allegations of cronyism and expense-fund abuse. But the LDP and its coalition partner, New Komeito, gave him support during the campaign while Shiro Asano, his major rival, was backed by the opposition Democratic Party.

Some voters said they preferred to stick with Ishihara rather than choose someone new.

"There were some scandals during his eight years," said Akinori Otake, 32, an engineer who said he voted for Ishihara. "But he didn't do anything so terrible, either. It's better to keep things as they are now, rather than taking a chance with another person."

Malaysian political bloggers form alliance

Source: MSNBC.

Group formed after personalities were demonized 'again and again'
By En-Lai Yeoh.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Malaysian online political commentators have formed a group to protect bloggers' interests after two of them were sued by a newspaper with close government ties.

The National Alliance of Bloggers' main goal is to "protect bloggers," and to try to get the government to see their point of view and why they have made certain postings, the new group's president, Ahirudin Attan, wrote on his popular blog "Rocky's Bru."

The alliance was formed late Thursday [April 5, 2007], Ahirudin wrote.

About 50 of Malaysia's popular online personalities held a meeting and decided to start the organization because a few bloggers were being "demonized again and again" by the government, Ahirudin said.

"When certain quarters in government become hostile towards bloggers, I believe they mean to aim their hostility at a small group of bloggers or online writers whose views and takes of current affairs they fear," Ahirudin wrote.

Ahirudin and Jeff Ooi, his deputy in the alliance, are being sued by the government-linked New Straits Times newspaper, which alleges that the two men made defamatory postings about the paper on their sites.

The government has also said it may consider registering bloggers to control anonymous posts with "malicious content." Authorities often use such terms for criticism of the government, or for discussions on race or religion — sensitive matters in the multiethnic, Muslim-majority country.

"If the politicians do not want to take the effort to learn about blogging and to understand bloggers, I believe the bloggers will have to take that initiative," Ahirudin said, without elaborating.

On Thursday, Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak said bloggers have made the "business of government more challenging."

"Some merely inform, others argue a point of view, and a few simply distort and sensationalize," Najib said. "There is now more competition for readership, viewership, eyeballs, revenues, profits and, yes, even infamy."