Asia Bibi Needs a Smartphone

by Les May

RAHAF Mohammed al-Nun is an 18 years old woman who has renounced Islam, fled Saudi Arabia, claims that if she were returned she would be killed, has been declared a refugee by the United Nations and has been granted asylum in Canada. Asia Bibi is 52 years old Pakistani woman who was on death row for eight years before being declared innocent of blasphemy by the Pakistan Supreme Court.  Since 2 November last year she has been in protective custody to keep her safe from mobs who refuse to accept the verdict of the court and want to hang her.

Whilst Rahaf has been enabled to start a new life Asia is still effectively a prisoner separated from her children and her husband.  So why the difference? Why has Rahaf attracted world wide attention and Asia been largely forgotten?

There’s a clue in a long article by Janet Street-Porter (JSP) in today’s Independent.  JSP slants her article so that Rahaf is to be seen as a woman fleeing from a male dominated society.  She even manages to bring in the 120 or so women at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre who, like Asia Bibi are separated from their family, as no doubt the men are too.  Rahef’s ‘crime’ is to simply want to make decisions about her own life. Asia Bibi’s is to be a Christian in a predominantly Muslim country.   The option she was given was convert to Islam or be tried for blasphemy. There’s no ‘feminist’ angle here.  It is, or should be, a human rights issue and deserving of our support for that reason.

There are two other reasons why these two women have been treated differently. When Rahaf reached Canada she was greeted by a government minister who went on to praise her countries diplomats.  Giving her asylum will not improve relations between Canada and Saudi Arabia. Pakistan has close ties with the UK, but Asia Bibi is something of an embarrassment to our government.   The Foreign Office has opposed offering her asylum, though it has been unwilling to go on the public record as to why it has taken this stance. Some people have viewed this as a willingness to ‘bend the knee’ to right wing extremists in Pakistan. I’m one of them.

The second reason is the simple fact that Rahaf has a smartphone and Asia Bibi does not. In one day Rahaf acquired 27,000 ‘followers’ on Twitter with her hashtag #SaveRahaf. For the Saudis the plight of one young woman had grown to an international incident overnight.

At present Asia Bibi is an innocent woman being held under what is effectively house arrest.  The president of Pakistan, Imran Khan, has shown himself unwilling to act to make sure she goes free immediately. Governments treat him with kid gloves in the hope of keeping him ‘on side’.  Saudi Arabia pumps money into the country to keep it solvent.   There’s little sign that the Bibi case will ever ‘go viral’ on Twitter. It seems being a Christian is seriously uncool amongst the Twitterati.

No doubt Rahaf’s story will get an outing in the Sunday papers this weekend and probably next week she’ll feature on Woman’s Hour.  As for Asia Bibi I’m not holding my breath as I wait for the feministas to notice.

*********** 

Appeal for Rohingya in Myanmar

Dear Foreign Minister Boris Johnson and Ambassador Sir Tim Barrow,


I am appalled at the apparent lack of political pressure, to date, from the
UN over the treatment of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar over a long period
of time. This has obviously been seen as a 'green light' to the military
leaders in that country to commit even greater atrocities.
It is not a sign of weakness to admit our training and arming of Myanmar
forces was wrong, as indeed is our selling of arms to Saudi Arabia to be used against civilians in Yemen.  I quote, hopefully correctly, David Davis MP, 'A democracy that cannot change its mind ceases to be a democracy'.
Please send a clear message to the UN that the situation in Myanmar is
ethnic cleansing and the UN has an obligation to take strong action on this
matter. It is pleasing that the UK has shown the way by suspending training
of the military in Myanmar, but more needs to be done.


--
John Wilkins (BOLD: Building Our Local Democracy)
[United Kingdom]

Is 'Stop War' misunderstanding Trump?

by Brian Bamford

'STOP the War' in a newsletter below issued yesterday* calling on Theresa May to end the 'Special Relationship' between the USA and the UK, declared:
'As Trump's aggressive foreign policy - which has led to further bombing in Syria and Iraq- becomes ever clearer it is urgent that we end the special relationship now.'
Most media pundits, other that 'Stop War', find Donald Trump's foreign policy anything but 'clear'. 
But last November, Thomas Wright, an expert on U.S. foreign policy at the Brooklings Institute said:  'No other election has had the capacity to completely overturn the international order - the global economy, geopolitics , etc.'
The conventional view is that President Trump is going to be an isolationist in so far as he is, according to Thomas Wright, 'opposed to America's alliance arrangements with other countries.'
What is fairly clear is that Trump is frustrated with the exiting alliance arrangements that mean that the U.S. has had to defend Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others such as the E.U. and does believe that the U.S. should keep coughing up so much. 
Referring to Hillary Clinton, Trump said:
'I would be slower to go to war than Hillary I would be very, very cautious. I think I'd be a lot slower.  She has a happy trigger.  You look, she votes for the wars, she goes in Libya.  I think it's a tremendous burden.  I think there is no greater burden that anybody could have.'
For pundits like Thomas Wright, what's not clear is if he means he just wants the others to pay a bit more, or whether he opposes the alliances overall,
If the latter is the case one would have thought that the Stop the War crowd  would be over the moon.
One would have thought that they would be even more over the moon, when he says NATO's original mission is 'obsolete', and that he doesn't believe that the U.S. (military) to be forwardly present.
* Help us to break the special relationship 'Today Theresa May goes to Washington. Any civilised or sensible government would be breaking links with President Trump but our PM is rushing to be the first foreign leader to meet him. As Trump's aggressive foreign policy - which has already led to further bombing in Syria and Iraq - becomes ever clearer it is urgent that we end the special relationship now. Stop the War Convenor Lindsey German said: 'Trump wants to increase military spending and the level of nuclear weapons. He also support torture. The special relationship has never benefited the people of Britain. With this president it will be positively harmful and should be ended.'

Shadow of the House of Saud.

by Brian Bamford

I first became aware of the importance of politics of Saudi Arabia in the late 1980s, at the time of the idict by the Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini  against Salman Rushdie over his book Satanic Verses.  A friend of mine, Zafar Khan, who was from Kashmir and then living in Luton told me that the campaign against Mr. Rushdie had allowed Shiite Iran to gain the initiative in the Islamic world over the sunni House of Saud.

What I scarcely realised until more recently was that the politics of oil as deployed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had dominated the world economy throughout the last half of the 20th century.  It began with the House of Saud using an oil embargo to do what the journalist Andrew Scott Cooper describes as a 'willingness to weaponize the oil markets'.  In October 1973, a coalition of Arab states led by Saudi Arabian stopped oil shipments in retaliation for America's support for Israel during  the Yom Kippur War.  After that the price of oil quadrupled leading to a big rise in the cost of living, mass unemployment and rising social disruption.

The brutal effect of the flooding of the oil markets by the Saudis that occurred in 1977 was one of the consequences of the problems that faced the Shah of Iran.  It was not the only cause of the Iranian revolution but it was one important issue:  The Shah regime was destabilised at a time when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini started his campaign to replace a pro-Western monarchy with a theocratic state.  The journalist Andrew Scott Cooper suggests that the oil markets 'fuelled the rise of political Islam'.

Today, most of us in the west don't remember this because we are not now the Saudis' main target.  Now the oil crises are more to do with regional politics, as well as being an attempt to hurt the American fracking industry by undermining prices to make it uneconomic to frack.

More recently the Saudis have shown that they see the oil markets as a front line in the Sunni Muslim-majority kingdom's battle against its Shiite-dominated rival Iran.   Mr. Scott Cooper writes that the favourite tactic of thre Saudis is 'flooding' or pumping surplus crude into a soft market, which amounts to war by economic means; 'the equivalent of dropping the bomb on a rival.'

In 2006, Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi security adviser, said that 'Riyadh was prepared to force prices down to “strangle” Iran's economy.'  Then in 2008, the Saudis acted on this with the aim of undermining Tehran's ability to support Shiite militia groups in Iraq, Lebanon and other places.

In this way the price of oil helped to end the Cold War.  At that time, the Soviet Union, like Russia today, as a Communist superpower was a global energy producer heavily reliant on incomes from oil and gas.  In 1985-86, the Saudis decision to flood the market led to a collapse in prices that sent the Soviet regime into decline.  'The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to Sept. 13, 1985,' wrote thre Russian economist Yegor Gaidar, 'on this date Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically.'

Currently in Russia, fully half of government revenue comes from oil and gas.  Inflation in Russia has exceeded double digits last year; its special fund which bails out Russian companies in difficulties, is low; and factory closures are encouraging labour unrest.

Venezuela, whose economy has been damaged by lost revenues from oil, that amounts to about 95% of its export earnings.   Inflation in Venezuela is predicted by the International Monetary Fund to reach 720% this year, and it is expected to become 'financial zombie state'.  The Left is blaming the USA for President Maduro's plight but his Venezuelan  regime is in reality at the mercy of the oil markets. 

It's all a cautionary tale of what can happen to countries that depend on heavily on a single unstable commodity price.  Russia for example is in fiscal crisis at a time when it is making military interventions in the Ukraine and Syria.