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For those longing for a moderate Islamic voice vociferating against the perils of fundamentalism and the evils of terrorism, Islamic scholar Dr. Tahir ul Qadri has published his fatwa against terrorism in Abu Dhabi’s The National:

“I have been compelled to issue a fatwa – a comprehensive theological refutation of Islamist terrorism – because of what has been happening in Pakistan over the past year. Terrorists are bombing mosques during Friday prayers, they are burning schools, killing women. They are digging bodies out of graves, cutting off their heads and hanging the bodies from trees.

My 600-page fatwa is based on all four schools of jurisprudence: Hanafi, Shafii, Hanbali and Maliki, and the Shia school of Jafari. I have consulted hundreds of classical Islamic texts, the scholars, fiqh and the Hadith. The main theme is this: any act of terrorism such as suicide bombing cannot be justified in any way. There are no conditions, no pretexts or exemptions. It is condemned by the Quran and the Sunna.

Killing Muslims and non-Muslims through terrorist activities and using violent aggression to impose their mistaken and misplaced ideology is a fundamental rejection of faith. Such acts make the people carrying out the attacks unbelievers, or kufr.

Some scholars have said to me that we know suicide bombing is forbidden but to say that this is an act of an unbeliever is going far. I am not saying anyone who kills is an unbeliever. I say one who is committing acts of terrorism on the basis that it is sanctioned and lawful by Islam is an unbeliever.

The Quran says those who kill in mosques, burn people, blow them up, they will suffer the torments of hellfire. This is one aspect.

A second aspect I have examined is the justification that Muslim rulers in Arab countries or non-Muslims are not enforcing Islamic law so there is an obligation to fight against them. This is absolutely wrong. In no context is any organisation allowed to take up arms on their own and say we are defending Muslim land or we are avenging the aggression of non-Muslim powers. This is a matter for a state and its government.

The holy Prophet Mohammed told his companions that bad rulers would come and the people would curse them and the rulers would curse their people. The companions asked should they not fight them with swords if this time comes? And the holy Prophet said that no, they were not allowed as far as they were Muslims.

As for adopting the defence that the attacks are against foreign aggression, this is the privilege and responsibility of the state to stand up and to fight according to international law. If groups and individuals start taking revenge it will create global anarchy and there will be no rule of law, there will be just killing of mankind.

There is a prophecy of the Prophet Mohammed. He mentioned that the Kharijites would emerge continuously in Islamic history. The Kharijites believed that whoever did not agree with their philosophy was an unbeliever and should be killed. They wanted to resolve everything through the sword and through power. They rose up in the time of the rightly guided Caliphs, Usman and Ali, and fought against them.

This hadith, which appears in dozens of books, says the holy Prophet Mohammed said they would emerge again and again in different centuries until the final time of the anti-Christ. They would arrive more than 20 times. They would keep changing names and appear for the last time as part of the anti-Christ’s army. They would slaughter people.

Al Qa’eda is an old evil with a new name. They are the Kharijites with a new name. They are misguided today like the Khawarij youth were misguided at that time. They were brainwashed although they were religious people who prayed and fasted.

Those who have already decided to become suicide bombers are totally brainwashed. I exclude them from this discussion because they are blind. I am trying to reach the majority who have not reached that stage but have extremist tendencies and are proceeding in that direction…”

Read more here.

Chinese women working full-time are not only longing for economic independence, they are also working for a sense of job satisfaction and fulfillment, a recent survey has found.

It shows that despite their steadily improving social status, 66 percent of working women believe men are favored for promotions and raises, even when they are capable of the same work.

Meanwhile, about 70 percent of respondents are working for companies in which women account for 30 percent or less of the senior executives and managers.

Launched by the Sun Media Group before International Women’s Day, the survey interviewed more than 5,000 women through online polls, telephone calls and face-to-face talks.
“Women have come to a career bottleneck,” Yang Lan, a CPPCC member and popular TV presenter, said in an interview with cnr.cn.

“The number of women decision-makers in companies is far from enough. It is not because they don’t have opportunities or they are unqualified.”

Yang said the current retirement rules have created a glass ceiling for women. For instance, both men and women reach the peak of their careers in their late 40s. Women, however, are less favored for promotions since they retire at the age of 55, five years earlier than men.

“We hope society can provide an equal opportunity for women to enter senior management levels,” she said.

Now the question remains: Is China making its first steps towards recognizing human rights?

Read more here.

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Between 1923 and 1930 Spain was ruled by General Miguel Primo de Rivera (whose son José Antonio will,  before being put to death by a Leftist tribunal, create the semi-fascist, quasi-socialist movement, Falange). While the regime of Miguel was officially authoritarian, it lacked many traits that are usually associated with military dictatorships: it was bland rather than bloodthirsty or cruel; it was not rightist –on the contrary, it favored the lower classes; it was not ended by a coup d’état, a revolution or a foreign invasion. The dictator resigned as soon as he found out that the side effects of the international Depression had dried up the reasonable prosperity his government had brought to Spain in the mid- and late Twenties. Furthermore, Marquis Primo de Rivera, a top general and a member of the Andalusian landowning upper nobility, did not uphold his class. On the contrary, he aroused the discontent of his fellow aristocrats, then still the dominant stratum of Spanish society.

The dictatorship used to be the legal, highly respected top office of the pristine Roman republic, a very strong position that in hard times was deemed vital to the survival or success of the State. In the 90 years between 1833, when king Ferdinand VII died, and 1923 (Primo’s military coup), Spain had 111 governments, 3 bloody civil (“Carlist”) wars and, in 1898, was disastrously defeated by the United States, so losing the last remnants of her American and Pacific empires. In addition, the country suffered serious reverses in North Africa and a few Anarchist attempts at social revolution, including in 1909 the Semana Tragica (Tragic Week). When Primo de Rivera stormed the government, the parliamentary regime of the liberal oligarchs had reached its end.

Immediately after the disaster of 1898, Joaquin Costa, the leading mind of the “Regenerationist” movement, had prophesied that Spain’s disease was so advanced that only an “iron surgeon”, that is a dictatorial innovator, could possibly heal the nation. That was exactly what Primo de Rivera was for seven years after 1923 –a Roman-type legal dictator who would demolish the parliamentary politics, wind up the colonial adventure in Morocco and then start doing something new in favor of the country: mitigating the century-old poverty of the masses and modernizing the economy. Ludovico Incisa di Camerana, a career ambassador who investigated Spanish problems for years, stressed in a remarkable book that Primo’s dictatorship “was oriented in favor of the working men, their unions and the Socialist party” and that he “destroyed the power of the oligarchy”.

Indeed, the social orientation of the dictator appeared so strong that his top labor lieutenant was Francisco Largo Caballero, who in the ‘30s, after Primo’s fall, led the whole of the Spanish left as “the Spanish Lenin” and in the Civil War became head of the Republican government. With the strong support of Socialist Largo Caballero and of José Calvo Sotelo (who at 32 was appointed the supremo of economy and finance, and whose assassination in 1936 ignited the Civil War), dictator Primo de Rivera acted decisively in favor of the workers. Then, he built roads, railroads, canals, hydroelectric dams, promoted industrialization and other economic programs. Strikes almost disappeared, the salaries improved. Between 1920 and 1929 state expense grew 50% in the field of education, 98% in subsidies to the poors, 200% in the overall health budget, of 2,246% in help to caring for children (before Primo the State gave practically nothing to children).

Most bona fide historians routinely admit that Primo de Rivera, while despising democratic institutions and practices, strove to help the working class. So much so that he aroused the bitter resentment of the privileged– especially those upper aristocrats who were insensitive, brutal and foolish enough as to try keeping everything they had, only to be almost annihilated in 1936 (many were put to death).

Of course, Primo de Rivera antagonized intellectuals, Miguel de Unamuno first of all, who certainly was the best. But political choices of intellectuals are very seldom realistic or relevant. It’s a fact that the temperament and behavior of General Primo were often such to excite criticisms. He was overly spontaneous, unmethodical, individualistic, sometimes capricious, much attracted by women, and so forth.

On the other hand, Primo was principled. He decided not to marry a very rich fiancée, Mercedes Castellanos (in the opinion of the King she was the Second Lady of Spain), after discovering that she made some money out of her social connections. And he vetoed a love affair between a son of his (not José Antonio) and Infanta Beatriz, daughter of the King. The explanation: a Primo de Rivera, being born very high, must not further climb the social ladder by becoming a relative of the monarch. Primo made a number of favors to his friends, but was also lenient with his enemies and very generous with poor people. Above all he, unlike so many liberal/democratic politicians, did not steal public money. No historian is known to have advanced allegations of corruption against Marquis Primo de Rivera, who was born rich.

In conclusion, having taken power a few months after Mussolini did, for 5-6 years Primo was as popular as the Duce would be. The Spanish dictator lost consensus when the economy worsened, both for too many public works and subsidies and for the consequences of the international Depression of 1929. In the previous years, most Spaniards approved Primo’s forcing out of power the oligarchs (the liberal politicians) and cancelling parties and parliamentary institutions. Labor particularly supported the populist, socially inclined side of the Dictadura, a regime which in a few ways resembled Fascism but in the main was rather inspired by the social doctrine of the Church (in addition to simple common sense).

On Jan. 28, 1930, the dictator resigned and left Spain, only to die in Paris 48 days later. Considering the tragedies of Spain between the very beginning of the XIX century and the Civil War of 1936, any dispassionate student of history cannot help judging Primo de Rivera as  the statesman who acted better than all Spanish liberal politicians, including the respected Canovas del Castillo, Sagasta and Antonio Maura. Of course, said politicians were not dictators. But they were worse than that– they perpetuated the socio-political marasmus that in 1936 made the rebellion of the proletarians inevitable and killed the national peace.

Israel’s decision to approve new East Jerusalem houses effectively prevents any peace negotiations from taking place, the Palestinian Authority said on Tuesday, following an Interior Ministry statement released earlier authorizing 1,600 new housing units.

Earlier Tuesday, the Interior Ministry approved the building of 1,600 new housing units in Ramat Shlomo, with a ministry official saying the plan will expand the ultra-Orthodox East Jerusalem neighborhood to the east and to the south.

The statement, released by the Interior Ministry’s Jerusalem district planning committee, headed by Ruth Yosef, said that at least 30 percent of the units will be allocated to young couples.

Public facilities and spaces which were, the statement said, lacking in the existing parts of the neighborhood, are also to be added as part of the new plan, including a new central park.

Meir Margalit, Meretz’s representative to the Jerusalem city council, claimed that the statement was meant to disrupt a visit by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, saying that he had “no doubt that the timing isn’t coincidental,” calling the announcement Interior Minister “Eli Yishai’s answer to Netanyahu’s willingness to renew indirect peace talks with the Palestinians.”

“The fact that Eli Yishai couldn’t restrain himself for another two-three days until Biden left Israel means his intention was to slap the U.S. administration in the face,” Margalit said, adding that the announcement was “a provocation to the U.S. and to the prime minister.”

Minister Yishai failed to comment at the statement, but is expected to respond to the Prime Minister’s office request and release an official statement explaining the new decision.

Meanwhile, sources in the Interior Ministry have said that the timing of the statement was purely coincidental and unrelated to Biden’s state visit.

Read more here.

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• Israel backs E Jerusalem building (news.bbc.co.uk)

Many women at the Jean-Marie Vincent site for displaced people (IDPs) in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince wash themselves inside their makeshift tents because the only alternative is to do so out in the open. Given the overcrowding and meagre security, this exposes them to the risk of attack or rape.

Going to the site’s latrines is also risky, especially at night, for there is no lighting and some toilets are isolated.

“We have not yet reached a standard of organization that respects women’s rights,” Smith Maximé of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in Haiti told IRIN.

“We have registered rape cases that occurred when women were in the latrines. When toilets are not secured – as in many of the camps – women are often attacked there,” he added.

“We are not safe here,” one woman in the Jean-Marie Vincent camp told IRIN, holding her two-month-old baby. “Three men attacked me as I walked to a latrine. They covered my face and my mouth and raped me.” Initially she said nothing but her pain was so intense, after three days she told some relatives.

The failure to meet established minimum disaster relief standards is “creating serious security, privacy and dignity concerns”, according to the Gender in Humanitarian Response Working Group*.

“Increased lighting surrounding those latrines should be an immediate priority to ensure the safety of women and girls using sanitation facilities at night,” the Group said in a statement issued in late February.

“Increased attention must be paid to the provision of dedicated and private bathing facilities to reduce women’s current vulnerability to sexual violence. Though many women and girls bathed outdoors prior to the earthquake, the nature of many IDP sites (crowded living conditions, living near strangers) is creating new vulnerabilities to violence and exploitation, in particular at night, that did not necessarily exist before,” it said.

Read more here.

Justice Minister Loucas Louca said Tuesday that the culprits responsible for the theft of the remains of former president Tassos Papadopoulos had demanded ransom from his family.

“Ransom was asked for but it was not paid,” said Louca.

He said police had recommended that no payment be made.

But there was a denial on behalf of the family.

Chryssis Pantelides a close associate of the former President on behalf of family insisted that there was no ransom demand or payment.

He called for responsibility from all those in positions of influence.

The former president’s body was found in Strovolos Cemetery Monday after a tip off to police,

His remains were taken December 11 a day before the 12 month anniversary of this death.

Read the full story here.

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• ‘Ransom bid’ in Cyprus body theft (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Tassos Papadopoulos: Missing Body Of Cyprus’ Ex-Leader Found (huffingtonpost.com)
• Corpse of former Cyprus president Tassos Papadopoulos found (guardian.co.uk)
• Cyprus police find missing body of late president (cnn.com)

Reports from Sao Paulo this weekend confirmed that Brazil’s President Lula da Silva will not be attending the very austere March 11 ceremony in Valparaiso to swear in Chile’s new president Sebastian Piñera, reports The Santiago Times.

Brazil government sources said da Silva had opted for an domestic agenda since the Chilean ceremony will be very simple and quick, and since da Silva already met with Mr. Piñera during the recent Group of Rio Mexico summit of Latin American and Caribbean leaders. The sources also noted that da Silva cut short his visit to Uruguay a week ago and flew to Chile to personally express Brazilian support to President Bachelet in the aftermath of the Feb. 27 earthquake.

“For the moment” there’s no trip planned to Chile for President Lula da Silva, however once the situation is back to normal “it is certain the president will hold a bilateral meeting with Piñera in Santiago,” said government sources.

A report from O Estado de Sao Paulo discarded “ideological differences” with conservative Piñera as the reason for Socialist da Silva’s absence from Santiago.

Uruguayan president Jose Mujica, however, has confirmed he will to travel to Santiago not only for Piñera’s inauguration, but also to express the Uruguayan people’s “solidarity and support” to the people and government of Chile following its tragic earthquake.

President Michelle Bachelet missed Mujica’s inauguration of in Montevideo on Monday, March 1, because of the earthquake. It will be President Mujica’s first foreign trip since taking office.

In related news, the White House reported that National Security Advisor, General James L Jones will be representing President Obama at the Chilean inauguration ceremony. He will be accompanied among others by Russell C. Crandall, head of Andean Affairs and the National Security Council.

Last week Secretary of State visited Chile where she met with outgoing President Michelle Bachelet and president elect Piñera.

A 6.0-magnitude earthquake hit villages in the eastern Turkish province of Elazığ early Monday morning, killing 51 people, injuring 50 and destroying many stone and mud-brick buildings.

The reported dead are concentrated in six villages around the center of the earthquake in the province’s Karakoçan district.

Although the quake’s epicenter was beneath the village of Başyurt, the worst hit area was Okçular village, where 17 people were killed and mud-brick homes were reduced to dust. Another 13 people were killed in the village of Yukarı Demirci, the Associated Press reported Gov. Muammer Erol as saying.

“Everything has been knocked down, there is not a stone in place,” said Yadin Apaydın, a local headman for the village of Yukarı Kanatlı, where he said at least three villagers died.

Relatives rushed to the village for news of their loved ones.

“The village is totally flattened,” village administrator Hasan Demirdağ told private channel NTV.

Ali Rıza Ferhat, an Okçular resident, said he was woken up by the violent shaking. “I tried to get out the door but it wouldn’t open. I came out of the window and started helping my neighbors. We removed six bodies.”

By noon, no bodies were left underneath the debris, Erol said, according to AP.

The earthquake struck at 4:32 a.m. local time, catching many locals in their sleep. According to the Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute, the earthquake measured 6.0 on the Richter scale and VIII on the MM intensity scale. More than 30 aftershocks, the strongest measuring 5.5 and 5.1, followed the quake, said the institute.

Red Crescent delivered 230 tents and 2,000 blankets to the villages where locals lit fires to keep warm.

Read more here.

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• Strong quake kills five in Turkey (news.bbc.co.uk)
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A North Korean democracy fighter here found a striking difference before and after the currency reform in the North through phone conversations with citizens carrying out the clandestine mission of reporting what’s going on there.

Seo Jae-pyong, a North Korean refugee working for bringing democracy to the secretive nation, predicted simmering public anger in the wake of the failed reform, along with the residents’ awareness of the outside world, would have an effect on change there in the future .

“Previously, they used to be upset at us when our activists at North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity (NKIS) called their leader simply Kim Jong-il without using his official position there,” he said.

Seo, secretary general of the NKIS, and others were advised to call the North Korean leader “Mr. General.”

After being elected as chairman of the North’s National Defense Commission, Kim was re-elected in 1998, 2003 and 2009.

“When we pick up the phone recently, these freelance correspondents were irritated as the pain they had to deal with has grown since the currency reform. They began conversations by pouring out harsh words against Kim,” Seo said in an interview with The Korea Times in Seoul last Wednesday.

NKIS has run a news outlet service based on mobile phone conversations with the secret correspondents since 2008 to raise awareness of the reclusive nation.

Meanwhile, The Daily NK reports that a leading North Korea watcher, Andrei Lankov of Kookmin University in Seoul, has issued a stern warning on North Korea to the international community. “We are heading towards serious changes,” he believes, “and unfortunately nobody seems prepared.”

Lankov, like everyone else, is unable to decisively conclude why the North Korean government has suddenly started making “such weird and self-defeating policy decisions,” but he does assert that Kim Jong Il’s clear frailty is probably a factor, one which not only influences his own policy decisions, but also allows for a “growing rivalry between factions,” meaning that the North Korean leadership may be becoming disunited, with “rival groups pushing through their own agendas.”

Read more here.

Russia’s updated military doctrine mentions the “desire of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to provide its force potential with global functions, the implementation of which goes against international law, to bring the military infrastructure of the NATO member countries to the borders of the Russian Federation, including through the means of expanding the bloc.”

In the West, and especially in NATO circles, this doctrinal thesis was received cautiously, and even with some resentment. The present realities, however, speak for the legitimacy of the document.

February 18 marked the 58th anniversary of NATO’s first expansion (initially the military bloc had just six member countries), when Greece and Turkey joined the Alliance in 1952. This event heralded in an amendment to the North Atlantic Treaty, as now documented in Article 6, which reads: “For the purposes of Article 5, an armed attack on one or more of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack: on the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America…on the territory of Turkey or on the islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer…”

This amendment was made simply due to the fact that Turkey is not a European state. Moreover, Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty, according to which only European countries may be members of NATO, contradicts Turkey’s membership in the military coalition.

Turkey’s accession into NATO contradicted Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which strictly restricts the geographical borders of the Alliance.

As for Ukraine, according to sociological surveys, the majority of its population is against the country’s membership in NATO. Nevertheless, according to Mr. Rasmussen, the Alliance has long made a decision that Ukraine will become its member. And that is democracy according to NATO. The people may desire what they may, but decisions will be made in the highest NATO structures, and it is not exactly clear in whose interests.

Clearly, the acceptance of Ukraine into the Alliance is not at all dictated by the desire to spread democracy. The eastward expansion of NATO has already provided the Alliance an ability, with the use of conventional weapons, to make tactical air strikes on Russia’s governmental and military centers, and well as its strategic nuclear forces. With Ukraine’s accession into NATO, which the United States is making significant efforts toward achieving, these abilities will become even greater. For example, Russia’s strategic air base, near the city of Saratov, is located just 600-800 kilometers away from Ukraine’s airports.

The adoption of new states into the Alliance does not so much resemble an expansion of the democratic space in Europe, as an actual encirclement of Russia by the new NATO members, who are ready to comply with any demand made by the leadership of the Alliance. One only needs to consider the secret CIA prisons in Lithuania as proof of that statement.

Read the full story here.

Read Der Spiegel’s piece on inviting Russia to join NATO here.