The record rainfalls triggering deadly floods in Libya and Greece dwarf the precipitation that caused Germany’s 2021 flood catastrophe, and are a grim reminder of the need to act on and adapt to climate change, said German climate researcher Mojib Latif in an interview with public broadcaster BR.
Business befor Politics as far as National Security is concerned for Trump
U.S. intelligence agencies received reports indicating that one of the U.S.’s closest Middle Eastern partners had signed a collaborative agreement with a sanctioned Russian mercenary group operating in Libya, according to a current U.S. intelligence official and two former officials with knowledge of the matter. U.S. intelligence agencies have been looking into whether the United Arab Emirates is helping to finance the Libya operations of the Russian Wagner Group. Both the UAE and Wagner have intervened to support Libyan strongman Khalifa Haftar, who has tried to overrun the United Nations-backed government in Tripoli.
Arms Sale to UAE Proceeds Despite U.S. Probe Into Wagner Ties
It’s the article that caused an outcry in the UK and pushed some pundits to compare the attack on migrants and refugees to the Nazi’s denigration of Jews.
On Friday, British tabloid The Sun, published by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, ran an article by columnist and former ‘TV Personality’ Katie Hopkins.
“Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants,” the title ran.
It was an article clearly designed to create controversy written by an author who has made a career doing just that. It worked.
“No, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad,” Hopkins started out, before referring to those fleeing north Africa across the Mediterranean as a “plague of feral humans”.
“Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit ‘Bob Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984′, but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb. They are survivors,” she went on.
What does Hopkins think should be done about these people?
“It’s time to get Australian,” she wrote.
“Australians are like British people but with balls of steel, can-do brains, tiny hearts and whacking great gunships.”
“Their approach to migrant boats is the sort of approach we need in the Med.
They threaten them with violence until they bugger off, throwing cans of Castlemaine in an Aussie version of sharia stoning.”
“And their approach is working. Migrant boats have halved in number since Prime Minister Tony Abbott got tough.”
It’s not entirely clear why someone cashing in on anti-immigrant sentiment would praise something they compare to “sharia stoning”, but there you go.
On radio, Hopkins described Australia as her “spiritual home”.
While other columnists have tried to avoid making the work of writers like Hopkins stories in their own right, the article was so extreme they couldn’t hold off.
Writing for The Guardian, Joe Williams saw similarities in Hopkins’ rhetoric and that used during the Rwandan genocide.
“This characterisation of people as less than human, as vermin, as a “virus” (as she did elsewhere in the article) irresistibly recalls the darkest events in history,” Williams wrote.
“It is eerily reminiscent of the Rwandan media of 1994, when the radio went from statements such as “You have to kill the Tutsis, they’re cockroaches” to, shortly afterwards, instructions on how to do so, and what knives to use.”
Over at The Independent, Simon Usborne saw similar parallels.
“In the environment that led to creation of the Third Reich in Germany, Polish people were seen as “an East European species of cockroach”, while Jews were rats.”
16 days out from the UK’s General Election, Labour supporters are using Hopkins’ opposition to their party as evidence of its merits. They’re hoping she’ll keep this promise.
The issue of boat arrivals has come to the fore in Europe as mass drownings continue to occur. Just days after Hopkins’ column was published a boat sank off the coast of Libya, sparking fears as many as 700 may have perished.
But Hopkins’ column didn’t even bother to raise the ‘deaths at sea’ argument, now the favoured talking point of those pushing inhumane policies in Australia.
While Hopkins’ work is self-evidently abhorrent, there is one compromise we should possibly be prepared to make when considering her arguments.
If Labour does win the UK election, and Hopkins is forced to flee with the hope of reaching her ‘spiritual home’, we’ll happily advocate for the gunships to be deployed to prevent her landing in Australia.
ON A chilly night, bearded militants gathered at a stage strung with colourful lights in Darna, a Mediterranean coastal city long notorious as Libya’s centre for jihadi radicals. With a roaring chant, they pledged their allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State group.
With that meeting 10 days ago, the militants dragged Darna into becoming the first city outside of Iraq and Syria to join the “caliphate” announced by the extremist group.
Already, the city has seen religious courts ordering killings in public, floggings of residents accused of violating Shariah law, as well as enforced segregation of male and female students. Opponents of the militants have gone into hiding or fled, terrorised by a string of slayings aimed at silencing them.
The takeover of the city, some 1,600 kilometres from the nearest territory controlled by the Islamic State group, offers a revealing look into how the radical group is able to exploit local conditions.
A new Islamic State “emir” now leads the city, identified as Mohammed Abdullah, a little-known Yemeni militant sent from Syria known by his nom de guerre Abu al-Baraa el-Azdi, according to several local activists and a former militant from Darna.
A number of leading Islamic State militants came to the city from Iraq and Syria earlier this year and over a few months united the most of Darna’s multiple but long-divided extremist factions behind them.
They paved the way by killing any rivals, including militants, according to local activists, former city council members and a former militant interviewed by The Associated Press. They all spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for their lives.
Darna could be a model for the group to try to expand elsewhere. Notably, in Lebanon, army troops recently captured a number of militants believed to be planning to seize several villages in the north and proclaim them part of the “caliphate.” Around the region, a few militant groups have pledged allegiance to its leader, Iraqi militant Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. But none hold cohesive territory like those in Darna do.
The vow of allegiance in Darna gives the Islamic State group a foothold in Libya, an oil-rich North African nation whose central government control has collapsed in the chaos since the 2011 death of longtime dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi.
Extremists made Darna their stronghold in the 1980s and 1990s during an insurgency against Gadhafi, the city protected by the rugged terrain of the surrounding Green Mountain range in eastern Libya. Darna was the main source of Libyan jihadis and suicide bombers for the insurgency in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion. Entire brigades of Darna natives fight in Syria’s civil war.
This spring, a number of Libyan jihadis with the Islamic State group returned home to Darna. The returnees, known as the Battar Group, formed a new faction called the Shura Council for the Youth of Islam, which began rallying other local militants behind joining the Islamic State group. In September, al-Azdi arrived.
Many of Darna’s militants joined, though some didn’t. Part of Ansar al-Shariah, one of the country’s most powerful Islamic factions, joined while another part rejected it.
The main militant group that refused was the Martyrs of Abu Salem Brigade, once the strongest force in Darna. The fundamentalist group sees itself as a nationalist Libyan force and calls for a democratically formed government, albeit one that must enforce stricter Shariah law.
For the past months, it has battled the al-Battar fighters and the Shura Council. Al-Battar accused the Abu Salem militia of killing one of its top commanders in June and threatened in a statement to “fill the land with (their) graves.”
Meanwhile, a militant campaign of killings in Darna targeted the liberal activists who once led sit-ins against them, as well as lawyers and judges. Militants also stormed polling stations, stopping voting in Darna during nationwide elections in March and June.
In July, a former liberal lawmaker in Darna, Farieha el-Berkawi, was gunned down in broad daylight. Her killing in particular chilled the anti-militant movement, said a close friend of el-Berkawi. “People had done their best (to force out militants) and got nothing but more bloodshed,” she told the AP.
Those who stayed tried to coexist. Some submitted letters of “repentance” to the Islamic militias, denouncing their past work in the government. Militant group Facebook pages are dotted with letters of repentance submitted by a traffic police officer, a former militiaman and a former colonel in Gadhafi’s security apparatuses.
With opposition silenced, militant factions first came together on October 5 and decided to pledge allegiance to al-Baghdadi and form the Islamic State group’s “Barqa province,” using a traditional name for eastern Libya. After the gathering, more than 60 pick-up trucks filled with fighters cruised through the city in a victory parade.
Last week, a second gathering in front of a Darna social club saw a larger array of factions make a more formal pledge of allegiance. Al-Azdi attended the event, according to the former militant. The militant himself did not attend but several of his close relatives who belong to Ansar al-Shariah did.
Now, government buildings in Darna are “Islamic State” offices, according to the activists. Cars carrying the logo of the “Islamic police” roam the city.
Women increasingly wear ultraconservative face veils. Masked men have flogged young men caught drinking alcohol, a former city council member told the AP.
Militants have ordered that male and female students must be segregated at school, and history and geography were removed from the curriculum, according to two activists in the city. New “Islamic police” flyers order clothing stores to cover their mannequins and not display “scandalous women’s clothes that cause sedition.”
Opposition to the militants, already scattered, is under threat. During the extremists’ first meeting, a colleague recounted how Osama al-Mansouri, a lecturer at Darna’s Fine Arts college, stood up and asked the bearded men: “What do you want? What are you after?”
Two days later, gunmen shot al-Mansouri dead in his car.
olddogthoughts 