Europe May Be Waking Up

From an article in USA Today:

• Supporters of the Swiss referendum collected enough signatures two weeks ago to call for a constitutional ban on minarets, the towers used to call worshipers to prayer. No date has been set for the vote.

• Italy's Interior Minister Roberto Maroni announced this month that he wants to close a Milan mosque because crowds attending Friday prayers spill onto the street and irritate neighbors. In April, the city of Bologna scrapped plans for a new mosque, saying Muslim leaders failed to meet certain requirements, including making public its source of funding.

• In Austria, the southern province of Carinthia passed a law in February that effectively bans the construction of mosques by requiring them to fit within the overall look and harmony of villages and towns.

• Far-right leaders from 15 European cities met in Antwerp, Belgium, in January and called for a ban on new mosques and a halt to "the Islamization" of European cities. The group said mosques act as catalysts for taking over neighborhoods and imposing Islamic ways of life on Europeans.

"We already have more than 6,000 mosques in Europe, which are not only a place to worship but also a symbol of radicalization, some financed by extreme groups in Saudi Arabia or Iran," Filip Dewinter, leader of a Flemish separatist party in Belgium, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide at the conference.

Ahmad Batebi: "A Dissident's Tale of Epic Escape From Iran's Vise"

An inspiring story of resistance to the brutal Iranian regime-- and escape to freedom:

"His own awakening began in fourth grade, when his teacher, fed up with the distortions of an official history textbook, burst out: “Go out and read other things to try to get the truth.”

"A few weeks later came the stoning. Though forbidden by his mother, he slipped out of the house to see the commotion near his school. He saw a man, accused of adultery, buried to the waist, his head covered with a sack that turned red as Revolutionary Guards hurled chunks of concrete. A mullah standing atop a wall gave the orders, and an ambivalent crowd of neighbors looked on.

“I was utterly shocked,” he recalled. “My hands and legs were shaking.” Afterward, he suffered from nightmares.

Imprisonment and torture:

"His jailers thrashed him with a metal cable, beat his testicles and kicked in his teeth, he said. They held his face down in a pool of excrement. They tied his arms behind his back and hung him from the ceiling. At other times, strapping him to a chair, they kept him awake night after night, cutting him and rubbing salt into the wounds.

To stave off madness, he said, he fought back. “If the interrogator cursed me, I would curse him back,” he said. “If the interrogator hit me, I’d try to hit him back.”

And, finally-- escape to freedom:

"After three days on the run, Ahmad Batebi picked his way down a rocky slope to the stream that marked Iran’s border with Iraq. His Kurdish guides, who had led Mr. Batebi, an Iranian dissident, through minefields and dodged nighttime gunfire from border guards, passed him to a new team of shadowy human smugglers.

A photograph of Mr. Batebi in 1999 holding a protester’s bloody shirt altered the course of his life.

At the age of 31, after nearly eight years in Iranian prisons, subjected to torture and twice taken to the gallows and fitted with a noose, Mr. Batebi had fled.

There's much more (Read it all).

Related resources:

1. There are some excellent articles about the Iranian resistance in Summers' column.

2. What drives Ahmadinejad? Video: Ahmadinejad's Bizarre Religious Views.

3. Israel's 1981 Raid on Iraq's Osiraq Nuclear Reactor — Links to a long (45minutes) but quite worthwhile History Channel video about this amazing raid, plus some related links.

4. Who's scared? Gulf states seek Israeli 'umbrella'; Iran's Shahab-3 alarms Italy, France.

5. Who's not? "The Photoshop War"- Iran You Suck At Photoshop - Internet Responds With Humor

(Cross-posted on A Deeper Look)


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