This interview appeared in Spanish newspaper El Ideal de Granada. You know I am not a specialist translating things but this is sufficiently important not to make an effort to traslate it. So I beg your pardon for any mistranslations the piece could have:
Arabist Pedro Martínez Jontávez (born in Jódar, 1933) was yesterday in Granada, to give a conference on Huntington, the US politologue and adviser of the last US President in Arab matters. He has just been awarded by United Arab Emirates as Cultural Personality of the Year, one of the highest awards from the Islamic world. Among other institutions, it was the Department of Arab Literature from the University of Granada, who proposed his name to the award, together with the University of Santiago de Chile. The arabist has the highest distinctions in his profession, and yesterday he received with pleasure the news of his appointment as honour associate of the Granada’s Ateneo.
-What is your own take on having been named as Cultural Personality of the Year by United Arab Emirates?
- I’m truly honored and it’s a great recognition of my works, they insist a lot in that I, personally, and through my works, have tried to build bridges of communication between the Arab world and Spanish and Latinamerican ones. They also say that I have succeeded in uniting the Spanish Arabists and the Hispanist Arabs.
-Are there still any prejudices about the Arab past?
-There are a lot and there is a lingering feeling of animosity which was bigger in past times. Bit by bit, the past from Al-Andalus is being known and valued in a more adequate and accurate way. There is an opinion tide which tries to build a myth of Al-Andalus and against it, there are also tentatives of ending with the myth.
-What concept people widely have of Islam?
-There is an idea growing of a much more monolithical Islam, which represents it through violence, fright and an absolute feeling of submission to religion, something which is an exaggeration and constitutes a prejudiced vision.
-Is there a mistaken idea of Islam?
- Arabic Islam is still a great unknown thing in a world where it’s seen through ignorance, mistrust and prejudices. We don’t know to distinguish between Arab and Muslim and we call them all “moros”. In Spain, a great public intelectual debate about what is and what was Al-Andalus is needed, what means the “Spanish” identity (well, they would say everything except the Catholic Church which is very bad and including Islam of which nearly nothing remains, except some buildings, which were so civilised as not to destroy them, something which is the opposite to what Iran is doing with Dario’s tomb and other pre-Islamic buildings). Al-Andalus is a treasure, a mine of values that we haven’t been able to take advantage of.
-What do you think about the project of the Alliance of Civilizations?
-As an idea and project, it’s useful, justified and necessary, although “alliance” is not the most accurate term for it. Moreover, it’s linked to political objectives. There’s no plan, no strategy, and they have not taken into account the Spanish Arabism, something that I consider an affront. And I speak from the independent and free position of not belonging to any political party (but from a position of someone who has been awarded a highest Arabic award in cultural affairs).
-Why Western countries try once and again to impose their democratic models to the Arab world? (Arab world has never tried to impose anything on others, not even by the sword… )
-Because that’s what they have tried to do ever. Studying the relationship between West and East through history, you can see that there were not only conflicts, but those were the more important times at all. Another reason is linked to the new power strategy, that of the new world order after the fall of the communist enemy and the creation of the enemy “Islam”. The activity of radical islamic minor groups can’t be ignored (wow, what a concession!! That can be acknowledged by reading the newspaper), but Western countries only allow one kind of terrorism, the islamic one, but no one can speak about State terrorism or make the error of saying that Israel is performing State terrorism (Gee, see? no mention to Iran with Hamas or Hizbullah or to Yemen and United Arab Emirates and the “grants” given to several Sept. 11 terrorists). Moreover, they are not islamic movements(now, they are not islamic, but before they were radical islamic…) but islamist, just the same that we should distinguish between popular and populism.
-What importance has García Lorca’s books in the Arab poetry?
-They consider him as a reknown Andalusian poet. Lorca is for Arabs an icon, an angel, a night confidant, a refuge, and with him, the Andalusian iconography recovers the references to the Mediterranean. Lorca is not only a treasure for the left but also for the entire humanity. All his works have been translated to Arabic, including his plays.
The five detainees at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay prison camp charged with plotting the September 11 attacks have filed a document expressing pride at their accomplishment and accepting responsibility for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people, The New York Times reported on Monday.
The five detainees at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay prison camp charged with plotting the September 11 attacks have filed a document expressing pride at their accomplishment and accepting responsibility for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people, The New York Times reported on Monday.
The document, which the newspaper said may be released publicly on Tuesday, describes the five men as the “9/11 Shura Council,” and says their actions were an offering to God, according to excerpts of the document read to a reporter by an unidentified government official, the report said.
“‘To us,’ the official read, ‘they are not accusations. To us they are a badge of honor, which we carry with honor,’” the paper said.
The document is titled “The Islamic Response to the Government’s Nine Accusations,” the military judge at the U.S. Naval base said in a separate filing, obtained by the Times, that described the detainees’ document.
“Your intelligence apparatus, with all its abilities … failed to discover our military attack plans before the blessed 11 September operation … Why then should you blame us, holding us accountable and putting us on trial?”
They criticize the U.S. for fighting “from behind roadblocks, trenches and warplanes” rather than face-to-face and describe Islam as “a religion of fear” for Jews, Christians and pagans.
“We are terrorists to the bone. So, many thanks to God,” they write.
Gee, so, the culprit of an attack is not the terrorist but the policemen who didn’t prevent it.
Islam = religion of fear for Jews, Christians and pagans. WOW!!! Even Wilders wouldn’t have said something soooo striking. Are they also going to punish them for “Islamophobia”?? You know, for hating Islam, presenting it as something different from the mantra-logo-slogan “Islam is Peace, Islam is the Religion of Peace”.
So, what is going to do Obama now? I don’t think these guys want to have a normal civilian life and I really don’t believe want to be a part of US society. Sooo?
another group of army soldiers also clashed with Jemaah Islamiya militants at around 4.40 a.m. in the village of Napnapan in Pantukan town in Compostela Valley province and capturing a Filipino bomb expert, Giovanni de Ocampo.
He said the captive admitted during interrogation that he is a member of the Indonesian militant group Jemaah Islamiya and is also an alleged commander of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
“Initial report revealed that he is a trainer and an expert in manufacturing of improvised explosives which has caused the death of many innocent civilians and destruction of properties in this part of Mindanao,” Bautista said without further elaborating, saying, security forces were still hunting down other Jemaah Islamiya militants in the province.
The Iraniab regime decided naming a Teheran’s street after one of the main militar chiefs of the Lebanese Islamist Shia group Hizbullah, Imad Mughniye, alleged intelectual author of the worst terrorist attack suffered by the US Army in foreign lands.
Teheran already has a street honoring the memory of Egyptian Jaled al Islambuli, murderer of Egyptian former President Anwar al Sadat, and the terrorist Ahmad Qasir.
(…) In 1984, a doble terrorist attack using a truck bomb, planned by Mughniyed while he was recovering from some wounds in a Beirut’s hospital, killed 276 US Marines and 56 French paratroopers in the Lebanese capital.
During the 90’s he lived in hiding, but in 2009 it seems he had returned to active service. After his murder, the Iranian regime buried him in the so-called “martyr’s cemetery”, near the Great Ayatollah Khomeini’s grave, where it has a black marble tombstone.
Mughniyeh is also believed to have been behind the 1992 bombing of Israel’s embassy in Argentina in which 29 people were killed, and the blast at a Buenos Aires Jewish center two years later that killed 95.
No one knows who killed him. But at the moment there was several guesses: one of them was the Mossad, another were the Iranians…
Gunmen attacked Sri Lanka’s cricket squad Tuesday ahead of a match with home team Pakistan, the latest sign of the government’s weakening grip over the country’s security.
The early morning attack in Pakistan’s cosmopolitan city of Lahore killed five policemen and injured six players, after about a dozen men fired assault weapons at vehicles carrying the Sri Lankan team and their guards, according to Pakistani and Sri Lankan officials. The Sri Lankan team captain, Mahela Jayawardene, was among those injured. By early afternoon, the team had been airlifted from the cricket stadium and had announced it was canceling the tour.
Six Sri Lankan cricketers and their British assistant coach are wounded as gunmen attack their bus as it drives under police escort in the Pakistani city of Lahore. Video courtesy of Reuters.
“They were our guests,” Pakistan’s Sports Minister Aftab Shah Gilani told NDTV, an Indian channel. “We are very sorry about this. It’s really shocking.”
Pakistani police have arrested four suspects, but didn’t offer details about who had carried out the ambush armed with Kalashnikovs, grenades and rocket launchers. No group had claimed responsibility immediately following the attack.
The incident dealt another blow to a government already reeling from security setbacks and various other crises. Tuesday’s attack is likely to heighten worries about the nuclear-armed nation, as it reinforces an impression that the government is getting weaker while an Islamic militancy grows stronger, says Hasan Askari Rizvi, a political and defense analyst who lives in Lahore.
What is the problem here? Bangladesh has postponed their series against Pakistan, as they had to travel to the country. So. ehh, this means the Talibans/Islamists/whoever they are have again won: normal life is displaced by terror. What is more, Pakistan has NO IDEA about who did this:
Lahore police chief Habibur Rehman said officers raided locations in and around the city and arrested “some suspects” at a hostel, but he added, “So far, we have not made any headway toward the perpetrators.”
What is more: a survivor has accused Pakistani police of fleeing
The former England batsman Chris Broad (…) slammed armed officers for leaving his group like “sitting ducks” as the killers sprayed bullets at his van and the coach carrying the Sri Lanka Test team in Lahore.
Broad said: “There was not a sign of a policeman anywhere. They had clearly left the scene.” The attackers – with hand grenades, machine guns and rocket launchers – fired for 15 minutes before calmly walking away.
Did they know that it was going to happen? Were they in some kind of agreement with the attackers? Or seeing five police officers had been killed were simply terrified?
So as they don’t know who did this, Pakistan has accused India of the attack. The Navy Minister, Sardar Nabil Ahmed Gabol, who belongs to the same political party as Pakistani PM, Zardari, considers this as a war declaration and previously the Punjab’s Governor has said that this bares “the same pattern as the Mumbay attacks, the same terrorists that attacked Mumbay, they were trained people”. So, India has not only had the disgrace of having people killed in its soil, now they have to bare also that the country who has been sheltering those same terrorists, accuses them of the terrorist attack. This is absolutely disgusting… No at all…
Angel and Ekawaaz have more on this terrible attack.
The ex-chief of ETA’s “military branch”, Txeroki has admitted the falseness of the torture charges on the Spanish Civil Guard by ETA terrorists Igor Portu and Mattin Sarasola. In a document who was taken from him when he was arrested on Nov 17th, 2008, he wrote that this was an strategy, explaining “you always should denounce tortures and ratify them before the Judge”. He adds, “on the other hand, even if the fall has been grave enough both for those from Lesaka and also for Txetxu and for Esti, everything related to the fall and with the false tortures suffered by Igor in the hands of our enemies is on the right path… that strategy must be followed ever“.
15 agents from the Civil Guard has been charged with tortures after the accusation made by these two members of the “Elurra commando”, which committed several terrorist attacks, among others the one who killed two persons in the T4 Terminal of the Madrid-Barajas’ Airport.
Today another, it looks Ertzaintzas (Basque Autonomous Police) have arrested another ETA terrorist, rising their absolutely shamefulenormous rate of arresting terrorists to two in 5 years…. . Well, three escaped when another one was caught last week-end.
The soldier has not been able to appear before the National Court’s judge because he is in hospital since he was arrested. Apparently he suffers from a mental illness, according to process’ sources.
Grazón, as petitioned by the Prosecutor Carlos Bautista, has freed the detained woman. She is obliged only to point an adress, because, even if it has been proved that they both edited and posted the videos in the web, they can’t be charged with terrorism.
The prosecutor believes they constitute only menaces without links to terrorism.
why if he is mentally ill, he was in the Army instead of having left it or being obliged to?
it’s not terrorism as they don’t belong to any terrorist gang and it’s not treason because they actually did not fight for a foreign Army. Terrorists can’t be considered as the army of any country, as the criminal law can’t be applied to other situations than those described exactly in them. Then they will be charged with non-terrorist menaces and that’s all. Speaking about the accurateness of anti-terrorist legislation…
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and two top government ministers have been sent anonymous death threats in letters stuffed with 9mm-calibre bullets, a judicial official said Tuesday.
Counterterrorism agents are investigating the mailings to Sarkozy, Justice Minister Rachida Dati and Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie – the latest members of the ruling conservative party to be targeted by such a letter campaign, the officials said.
The two-page, typed form letters feature disjointed messages addressed to “purveyors of freedom-killing and fascist laws,” the judicial official said, on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
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