725 Siege in Sydney, School attack in Pakistan

Siege in Sydney, School attack in Pakistan

Newsletter published on 17 December 2014

(1) Sydney Siege - from Andrew S MacGregor
(2) Sydney's problem? It's immigration, stupid! - from Denic McCormack
(3) Peshawar school attack: Taliban 'burn teacher alive in front of
pupils and behead children'
(4) Pakistan’s Transition from Shia to Sunni Leadership
(5) Pakistan's Shia under attack from Sunni Jihadis; Zia vs Bhutto

(1) Sydney Siege - from Andrew S MacGregor

Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 10:05:43 +1100
From: Andrew S MacGregor <ama18870@bigpond.net.au>
To: peter@mailstar.net
Subject: Re: Sydney Siege

Dear Peter,

My understanding is that the 'gunman' actually had a shotgun, and that
one of the police was ever so slightly wounded by two shotgun pellets.
That means that if Dawson was shot with a bullet, then it was a police
bullet.  I thought MSM reports last night stated that dawson actually
died of a 'heart attack'.

Andrew S MacGregor

(2) Sydney's problem? It's immigration, stupid! - from Denic McCormack

From: Denis McC <wizard_of_aus@hotmail.com>
To: tony abbott <tony.abbott.mp@aph.gov.au>, bernard salt
<bsalt@kpmg.com.au>, "hinch@hinch.net" <hinch@hinch.net>
Subject: What IS (Islamic state) Sydney's problem? It's immigration, stupid!
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 03:08:14 +0000

Dear Tony...

Fraser's, Hawke's, Keating's, Howard's, Rudd-Gillard-Rudd's co-created
immigration problem is now all yours, this is what you should "sweat
blood" over Tony - not your 2017 already lost Abbo-Abo constitutional
recognition referendum...REDUCE IMMIGRATION and with luck you might even
be in office when it is held!

Our ghoulish domestic wall-to-wall, all stables and platforms, shallow,
repetitive, mawkish rolling coverage of the Sydney siege has been
Orwellian...USA's PBS TV's NewsHour (on relay via SBS TV here yesterday
arvo) gave better informed coverage in it's opening 10 min. seg. on
Sydney siege than anything done by anyone here anywhere in the 24 hours
of simpleton's coverage here!

You must have known Howard's Senior Social Policy Adviser, the late John
Perrin, he died in 2006 better informed than you'll ever be because he
was an uncompromised, intelligent, fast learner - see his letter
attached. If you don't understand the significance of the train of
events unleashed by the Balfour Declaration you'll never make sense of
the ever deepening mess you are getting Australia into:
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/CofCchap7.pdf

Here below are two more insightful views on the Sydney Siege/immigration
problem than anything offered by MSM here:
(1) Sydney Siege: From E. Michael Jones
(2) Sydney Siege: Peter Myers to E. Michael Jones
(3) Excessive Police Firepower in Sydney Siege

(3) Peshawar school attack: Taliban 'burn teacher alive in front of
pupils and behead children'

Subject: Peshawar school attack: Taliban 'burn teacher alive in front of
pupils and behead children'
From: Micdavid <micdavid@zo.com.au>
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 16:36:00 +1100
To: Peter Myers <peter@mailstar.net>

Peshawar school attack: Taliban 'burn teacher alive in front of pupils
and behead children'

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/peshawar-school-attack-taliban-burn-teacher-alive-front-pupils-behead-children-1479767

p
not just jews setting the oz public against muslims, their sects are
doing fine without any help.
m

Peshawar school attack: Taliban 'burn teacher alive in front of pupils
and behead children'

  By Lianna Brinded

December 16, 2014 12:40 GMT

Taliban terrorists allegedly burned a teacher alive and made the
students watch during their attack on a Pakistan school which left over
130 people dead.

According to a NBC News report, citing an unnamed military official, the
terrorists stormed the Army Public school in Peshawar, in north-west
Pakistan, and committed the horrific act as well as detonating a suicide
bomb which killed a number of students.

"They burnt a teacher in front of the students in a classroom," the
unnamed military source told the US TV network.

"They literally set the teacher on fire with gasoline and made the kids
watch."

At least six militants entered the Pakistani school wearing security
uniforms, before massacring an estimated 132 people and injuring another
122.

Most of the school's 500 students have been evacuated. The Pakistani
army claims to have killed five terrorists and is conducting a search
for more, while more hostages are believed to be held inside the school.

Pakistani officials have yet to verify the burning of the teacher, or
other reports that some of the bodies of the dead school children are
being brought into the hospital headless.

According to a tweet by Omar R Quraishi, an editor at the The Express
Tribune who has over 154,000 Twitter followers, "Some of the bodies
brought to hospital during the Peshawar school attack have been
headless: source."

Some of the bodies brought to hospital during the Peshawar school attack
have been headless: source— omar r quraishi (@omar_quraishi) December
16, 2014

Another report, quoting an injured student from the siege, supported the
comment above.

Heartbreaking quote from a student injured by the Taliban in Peshawar
school siege. Updates: http://t.co/zNXGyzUizl
pic.twitter.com/G1MCSJsl55— BuzzFeed India (@BuzzFeedIndia) December 16,
2014

Again, authorities have not confirmed this report.

Meanwhile, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has called for a
three-day period of mourning to be extended nationwide.

He has also requested an all-party conference in Peshawar tomorrow.

(4) Pakistan’s Transition from Shia to Sunni Leadership

by Joel | 13 October 2006 · 6:26 pm

From: The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the
Future, by Vali Nasr (W. W. Norton, 2006), pp. 88-90:

Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was an Ismaili by birth and a
Twelver Shia by confession, though not a religiously observant man. He
had studied at the Inns of Court in London and was better versed in
English law than in Shia jurisprudence, was never seen at an Ashoura
procession, and favored a wardrobe that often smacked as much of Savile
Row as of South Asia. Yet insofar as he was Muslim and a spokesman for
Muslim nationalism, it was as a Shia. His coreligionists played an
important role in his movement, and over the years many of Pakistan’s
leaders were Shias, including one the country’s first governor-generals,
three of its first prime ministers, two of its military leaders
(Generals Iskandar Mirza and Yahya Khan), and many other of its leading
public officials, landowners, industrialists, artists, and
intellectuals. Two later prime ministers, the ill-fated Zulfiqar Ali
Bhutto and his Radcliffe-educated, currently exiled daughter, Benazir
Bhutto, were also Shia. Feeling the wind shift in the 1990s, Benazir
styled herself a Sunni, but her Iranian mother, her husband from a big
Shia landowning family, and her father’s name, the name of Ali’s
twin-bladed sword, make her Shia roots quite visible. In a way,
Benazir’s self-reinvention as a Sunni tells the tale of how secular
nationalism’s once solid-seeming promise has given way like a rotten
plank beneath the feet of contemporary Pakistan’s beleaguered Shia minority.

Benazir’s father came from a family of large Shia landowners who could
afford to send him for schooling to the University of California at
Berkeley and to Oxford. He cut a dashing figure. Ambitious, intelligent,
and secular, he was a brilliant speaker, with the ability, it is said,
to make a crowd of a million people dance and then cry. His oratory
manipulated public emotion as the best of Shia preachers could, and his
call for social justice resonated with Shia values. His party’s flag
conveniently displayed the colors of Shiism: black, red, and green.
Although he never openly flaunted his Shia background, he commanded the
loyalty of Pakistan’s Shia multitudes, around a fifth of the population.
What he lacked in the area of regular religious observance he made up
for with his zeal for Sufi saints and shrines, especially that of Lal
Shahbaz Qalandar, the widely popular Sufi saint of Shia extraction whose
tomb is a major shrine in southern Pakistan.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s years in power (1971–77) marked the pinnacle of
Shia power in Pakistan and the high point of the promise of an inclusive
Muslim nationalism. But the country that Jinnah built and Bhutto ruled
had over time become increasingly Sunni in its self-perception. The
Sunni identity that was sweeping Pakistan was not of the irenic Sufi
kind, moreover, but of a strident and intolerant brand. Bhutto’s
Shia-supported mix of secularism and populism—sullied by corruption and
his ruthless authoritarianism—fell to a military coup led by pious Sunni
generals under the influence of hard-eyed Sunni fundamentalists. In
April 1979, the state hanged Bhutto on questionable murder charges. A
Sunni general, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, strongly backed by Sunni
fundamentalist parties, personally ordered that the death sentence be
carried out, even after Pakistan’s highest court recommended commutation
to life imprisonment.

The coup of 1977 ended the Pakistani experiment with inclusive Muslim
nationalism. Shia politicians, generals, and business leaders remained
on the scene, but a steadily “Islamizing” (read “Sunnifying”) Pakistan
came to look more and more like the Arab world, with Sunnis on top and
Shias gradually pushed out. Pakistan in many regards captures the
essence of the political challenge that the Shia have faced. The promise
of the modern state has eluded them as secular nationalism has been
colonized from within by Sunni hegemony.

(5) Pakistan's Shia under attack from Sunni Jihadis; Zia vs Bhutto

https://faroutliers.wordpress.com/2006/10/13/pakistans-transition-from-shia-to-sunni-leadership/

http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424053111904353504576568251074910290?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424053111904353504576568251074910290.html

The Plight of Pakistan's Shia

The country's largest religious minority is a bellwether for its
struggle against radical Islam.

By SADANAND DHUME

Wall St Journal

Updated Sept. 13, 2011 3:51 p.m. ET

Is Sunni-majority Pakistan in the midst of a low-grade war against its
minority Shia population? Scarcely a month goes by without word of a new
atrocity: a car bomb outside a Shia mosque in Quetta during Ramadan, a
suicide bombing of a Shia procession in Lahore, Shia doctors
mysteriously shot in Karachi.

In July, after prosecutors failed to find evidence of his alleged
involvement in the murders of scores of Shia, the Supreme Court released
Malik Ishaq, leader of the banned Sunni sectarian group
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. He promptly received a hero's welcome from his
followers. The Pakistani government has allowed Sunni-ruled Bahrain to
openly recruit Pakistani mercenaries to put down a restive Shia majority
demanding democratic rights in the oil-rich kingdom.

The country's Shia are worried. In July, hundreds took to the streets of
Quetta to protest the ongoing killings. Others have begun an online
petition to draw attention to their plight. In private, some Shia wonder
whether over time they will meet the same fate as the heterodox
Ahmadiyya community, stripped of their recognition as Muslims and
hustled toward the margins of national life.

  Enlarge Image

A wounded boy is carried away from an Aug. 31 bombing of a Shia mosque.
European Pressphoto Agency

All this over what to many people is an obscure theological debate
shrouded in history. Shia revere Ali, the prophet Muhammad's son-in-law
and Islam's fourth caliph. They regard the denial of Ali's alleged right
to succeed the prophet on his death, his subsequent murder, and the
martyrdom of his son Hussein at Karbala (in present-day Iraq) later as
seminal events.

To be sure, compared to other religious minorities—Ahmadis, Christians
and Hindus—the Shia are relatively fortunate. They have so far faced no
battery of discriminatory laws, and their exposure to the country's
toxic culture of permissible violence is both relatively recent and
somewhat limited. But this position of comparative privilege is
precisely why the Shia matter so much to Pakistan's future.

The 36-million-strong community is a bulwark against the violent Sunni
fundamentalism of groups such as the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and
Punjab-based Sipah-e-Sahaba. Reverence for Islamic shrines and other
practices considered impure by Sunni extremists make them among the
fiercest opponents of the intolerant, triple-distilled Islam of the
Taliban.

Judging by Pakistan's history, that Shia in this country face any degree
of violence or discrimination is ironic. The country's founding father,
Mohammed Ali Jinnah, belonged to a Shia sect, the Khoja, whose followers
are famous in the subcontinent for their business acumen. Many of
Jinnah's top lieutenants in the Pakistan movement were also Shia.

Unlike much of the Arab world, where Shia have traditionally constituted
an underclass, the community in Pakistan began with a seat at the head
table of power. In the early decades of independence, Pakistan had two
Shia presidents and at least one Shia prime minister. The list of
prominent generals, businessmen, ambassadors and newspaper editors from
the community is too long to recount.

Only in the 1980s, under the fundamentalist Sunni dictatorship of Gen.
Zia ul-Haq, did the compact between Sunni and Shia begin to fray. Partly
to protect their distinct identity, Shia protested the general's clumsy
attempt in 1980 to impose a uniform alms tax on all Muslims.

Around the same time, Pakistan was sucked into a shadowy proxy war for
influence between two rival strains of radical Islam: the messianic Shia
variety propagated by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, and Wahhabism, an
austere back-to-basics form of Sunni Islam championed by Saudi Arabia.

The explicitly anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba (Soldiers of the Prophet's
Companions), born in southern Punjab in 1985, took up the cause of Sunni
peasants in a region dominated by large Shia landowners. Over the years,
a clutch of Shia rivals, including the banned Sipah-e-Muhammad (Soldiers
of Muhammad), have attempted to fight back.

Over the past three decades, violence between Sunni and Shia has ebbed
and flowed, but two things are clear. First, despite spawning banned
violent sectarian outfits of their own, the Shia have largely been on
the receiving end of violence. In a 2005 report, the International
Crisis Group estimated that Shia accounted for 70% of sectarian deaths
over the previous 20 years. In recent years, the violence has spread
from southern Punjab and (sporadically) Karachi to Quetta in
Balochistan, and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas on Pakistan's
troubled border with Afghanistan.

Second, the space to be publicly Shia in Pakistan has shrunk
dramatically. This is most obvious in the tale of the Bhutto family.
Though not overtly pious, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who ruled from 1971 to
1977, is described by Vali Nasr of Tufts University as marking "the
pinnacle of Shia power in Pakistan."

But by the late 1980s, Bhutto's daughter Benazir, who herself became
prime minister, had begun to call herself a Sunni. Her husband, current
President Asif Ali Zardari, maintains a studied silence on the subject,
an apparent attempt to attract Shia support without tempting
fundamentalist Sunni ire.

For Pakistan, founded as a homeland for all Indian Muslims, the
Sunni-Shia divide is an awkward subject that many would rather ignore.
But the rest of the world needs to pay more attention to this conflict
in the shadows. If Pakistan can't even protect its numerous and
well-connected Shia, then the odds of moderates prevailing over
extremists in an ongoing battle for the country's future look
exceedingly slim.

Mr. Dhume is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in
Washington, and a columnist for WSJ.com. Follow him on Twitter @dhume01