Category: General Musings

From Arab News Q. May I ask whether it is permissible to read the Qur’an without having performed ablution or wudhu? The answer, whilst putting several scholars points of view, settles on this answer. ….. reading the Qur’an is a more involved task than holding it, and there is no disagreement among scholars that while it is better to have ablution before reading the Qur’an, it is permissible to read it without ablution. Or thinking, as reader HRT suggests. I’m not normally one to denigrate or redicule religion per se but for an article of this nature to be published in a major daily Arabian newspaper is akin to the Australian telling Catholics how to accept the host at Holy Communion. They still have a long way to go.

From the Australian: Angry US slams Iraq bribe denials. Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?

THE chairman of a powerful US Senate committee is demanding Australian ambassador to Washington Dennis Richardson explain the Howard Government’s role in the Iraqi wheat affair, saying he is “deeply troubled” by an apparent attempt to cover up the scandal.

It’s not quite the ‘US’ it is Republican Senator Norm Coleman, who is chairing the Senate’s inquiry into “illegal, under-the-table” payments to Saddam Hussein’s regime and I would suggest he is not so much ‘deeply troubled’ as ‘very excited’ at the possible damage to Australia’s wheat trade. The good Senator represents Minnesota that just happens to produce 15% of the US Spring wheat crop.(scroll down) Now let’s see; spring in the US would be autumn in Australia which must be about when our summer harvest is ready for sale. I’m not suggesting the man has any vested interests in knocking Australia’s wheat sales. I don’t have to, it’s obvious. Neither am I suggesting the enquiry shouldn’t run it’s course but the media needs to point out obvious connections when they splash headlines scross their pages. Maybe if Caroline Overington and Geoff Elliott, the authors, had spent five minutes googling they might have been able to point out the Senator’s vested interests. Just a thought.

With Parliament still in Summer break the ALP are beside themselves with the AWB fiasco. Ever keen to prove Howard micromanages every single aspect of government they are braying in ecstacy trying to get the public to pick up on a connection between Howard writing a standard ‘PM encouraging the troops’ type letter and extrapolate that to mean he is saying ‘pay all the bribe money you need, just get the job done’ Not working, guys. The media move into feeding frenzy mode nowithstanding there a very few morsels. Terry McCrann, writing in the Herald nails it with this piece.

THE John Fairfax print media group’s Marian Wilkinson clearly thought on Sunday night she had been handed the much-desired ‘smoking gun’. Pity for her, it was a smoking pop-gun. That though didn’t stop Wilkinson, who preaches, so to speak, at the David Marr School of Hate-Howard Journalism, from throwing facts and fairness — to coin a phrase — completely overboard.

But the best take is at The Currency Lad’s place where he talks of an amusing outbreak of Howard Derangement Syndrome Well worth the read.

Poor, poor Palestine

From the JAKARTA Post under the banner “News from foreign broadcasters cannot be aired lively” For a moment I thought they meant the items must be presented in a sombre manner. But no…it’s just plain old censorship and accountability. JAKARTA (AP): Indonesia next month will begin enforcing a law that bans local broadcasters from relaying live news packages provided by foreign stations like the British Broadcasting Corp.and Voice of America, Minister of Communications Sofyan Djalil said Monday.

Stations will have to first receive the broadcasts, edit them and then rebroadcast from a local relay station, he said.Sofyan said the reason for the law was so that viewers could hold “someone responsible” if the broadcasts were offensive.

The more things change…….

From the Guardian/Observer

A missile fired from a Predator killed more than 20 innocent people in Pakistan earlier this month in a botched US bid to kill Ayman al Zawahiri, the deputy leader of al-Qaeda, and similar attacks have been made in Iraq, Yemen and on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Excuse me. Where did the “innocent people” bit come from. According to an AP report;

… a provincial government of Pakistan had released a statement that said four or so “foreign terrorists” (they were not identified beyond that) had been killed in the CIA missile attack. And Pakistani intelligence officials told AP that Zawahiri had been invited to a dinner in the village but did not show up. Pakistan’s Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao would only say that there was a “possibility” that foreigners–presumably, militants–were killed in the strike. Officials in the tribal zone where the missile landed said separately that the strike was aimed at foreign militants invited to a dinner and that up to five of them were killed — the first such confirmation by Pakistan.

They then try and leave the impression that a previous Predator strike only killed one al-Qaeda operative but they use the “alleged” tag to indicate they don’t believe he’s a bad guy and that the US shouldn’t have struck.

An earlier case of what President George W Bush described as ‘sudden justice’ occurred in Yemen on 3 November 2002, when six men were killed in a car, blown up by missiles fired from a CIA-controlled Predator drone. One of the people in the vehicle was alleged to be a senior member of al-Qaeda, Abu Ali al-Harithi.

Reading that you would believe that maybe one guy was a terrorist and then only maybe when in fact he was a senior el Qaeda terrorist and the other five guys were also terrorists. Would a guy as senior as Abu Ali al-Harithi be driving around with the local boy-scout troop? From the Age November 6, 2002

A missile fired by an unmanned American aircraft over Yemen has killed six suspected al Qaeda terrorists on the first occasion the Predator drone has been used outside Afghanistan. A senior United States Government official said Yemeni officials had identified one of the men killed on Sunday as Abu Ali al-Harithi, an al Qaeda leader and one of the terrorist network’s top figures in Yemen.

Al-Harithi was one of the suspected planners of the October, 2000, attack on the USS Cole in which 17 sailors were killed while the ship was berthed in Aden and has been linked to the October 7 bombing of a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen. All this is good stuff until Annesty gets their hands on it.

According to Amnesty, under international standards, extra-judicial killings are always unlawful, and ‘a state of war or threat of war, internal political instability or any public emergency may not be invoked as a justification for such executions’.

The US are at war and some lawyer says they can’t kill the enemy. “Extra judicial” is a cute feel-good phrase that means nothing in the battle field. What do they want the Yanks to do? Issue a summons?

Defence building collapses in Canberra. Staff at the Australian Defence College began to evacuate after hearing rumbling in the roof of the five-year-old building about 4.15pm (AEDT) today. Several people sustained cuts and bruises, but there were no serious injuries. The roof collapsed into the top floor of the two-level building, Australian Defence College commander Major General David Morrison said.

“There was an indication that something was amiss and staff started to evacuate the building when the roof came down to desk top and filing cabinet level,” he said.

Eight people had been in the immediate vicinity of the roof collapse, but 20 were in the entire building Does the reporter mean the Australian Defence Force Academy? UPDATE: Readers tell me it is the Weston Creek Annexe, which houses the Command and Staff College, and the Defence and Strategic Studies Centre. There will some contractors in the ACT having a poor sleep tonight.