text:
by Richard L. Rubenstein (January 2013)
A review essay of Bat Ye'or, Europe, Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010). This essay was first published as "Coming Attractions: Caliphates?" in the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, December issue Vol 4 #2.
In the past few years, it has become all too apparent that the nations of the European Union (EU) have made a catastrophic mistake when they created a common, one-size-fits all currency, the euro, ignoring the vast differences in productive capacity, financial resources, work habits, and culture of the member nations. The full consequences of this mistake have yet to unfold, but the instability in the world's financial markets may be a foretaste of darker troubles ahead.
While the financial crisis has been recognized, a far worse error of judgment has yet to be recognized, at least by Europe's leaders, the surrender of Europe's cultural identity as a consequence of the introduction of a largely unassimilable Muslim population into the EU. According to the U.S. Department of State's Annual Report on International Religious Freedom, 2005, the EU's Muslim population numbered 23.2 million and has continued to increase since then. In France alone, the Report estimated that there were between five and six million Muslims, about ten percent of the population. Moreover, as Harvard Historian Niall Ferguson has pointed out, the fundamental problem facing Europe's indigenous population is "senescence."1
This is not true of Europe's Muslim population. With or without further immigration, it is expected to increase considerably. Moreover, as Bat Ye'or points out in her new book, Europe, Globalization, and the Coming Universal Caliphate (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011) the rising number of Muslims constitute only a part of the problem. Far more problematic have been the political, economic, and cultural motives that led to Europe's fateful decision to permit this unprecedented mass immigration.
To explain that decision, Bat Ye'or begins with a discussion of the concept of dhimmitude, a term she characterizes as "concealed knowledge." Although "few terms are as significant for the understanding of current events," she reports that the term is "unknown by the general public and taboo in academia." Dhimmitude, she argues, designates the civilizations "conquered by jihad and subject to sharia law." It is her conviction that the nations of the European Union (EU) are in the process of submitting to that subordination at the present time. Alternatively, as she demonstrates, dhimmitude can be understood as arguably the most effective and enduring system of religiously legitimated domination human beings have ever created.
A dhimmi is a non-Muslim belonging to the civilization of dhimmitude. Either he or his ancestors surrendered to the armies of jihad and consequently lost their sovereignty and their territorial rights in exchange for "protection" in the form of a contract of surrender (dhimma) against jihad. Such protection renders dhimmis essentially powerless and subject to the humiliating conditions imposed upon them by their masters. It should be further noted that dhimmitude is a condition that can only be altered by a highly unlikely reversal of military fortune or, far more likely, conversion to Islam.
According to Bat Ye'or, the concept of dhimmitude is relevant today because, with the exception of Israel, Islam's jihad ideology of world conquest is once again flourishing in every corner of the world while the governments of most target nations are in denial concerning jihad's existence and its global aspirations. Global jihad is driven by the 56 nation Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC), formerly known as the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Since its creation in 1969, the OIC has been dedicated to the destruction of the State of Israel and to the eventual implementation of sharia over the Western world. The OIC's oft-stated objectives have not prevented either the European Union or the United States from seeking close ties with the organization. At least theoretically, dhimmitude represents an interim status in which Islam conditionally accepts defeated subject peoples into its midst, provided they abide by the controls and limitations imposed upon them by their Muslim overlords. This willingness on the part of Islam to create a religiously legitimated civilization of domination and submission is often misleadingly characterized as tolerance.
In 1990, the OIC issued the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. It represented the culmination of Muslim dissatisfaction with the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a strictly secular document. The Preamble to the UN Declaration states: "Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world." Article 1 states: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights."
Both statements are clearly contrary to the fundamental tenets of Islam where there is no such thing as the "inherent dignity" or the "equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family." Neither the unbeliever nor the dhimmi have "inalienable rights" nor can such "rights" be the "foundation, of freedom, justice, and peace of the world." In Islam, Allah is the source of human rights, all of which are conditional upon faithful obedience to his law as expressed in sharia and the hadiths.
This was clearly understood by Muslim leaders at the UN in 1948, but at the time there was little they could do about it. However, on December 7, 1984, Said Rajaie-Khorassani, Iranian Ambassador to the UN, declared that the UDHR represented "a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition" that could not be implemented by Muslims. He argued that "human dignity could not be reduced to a series of secular norms and that Iran recognized no authority or power but that of Almighty God and no legal tradition apart from Islamic law.2
The sectarian character of the Cairo Declaration is clear. Article 24 states: "All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari'a (sic)." Lest there be any doubt about the intent of the Cairo Declaration, Article 25 states: "The Islamic Shari'a is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification of any of the articles of this Declaration (emphasis added)."
In Europe, Globalization, and the Coming Universal Caliphate, Bat Ye'or cites Bassam Tibi, a world-class, Muslim scholar in order to clarify how utterly different the Cairo Declaration is from the UDHR. According to Tibi, "peace only exists between Muslims, and not between Muslims and non-Muslims" and non-believers can only achieve peace with Muslims through conversion or submission (dhimmitude)." Tibi further explains that for a Muslim, "striving in the path of Allah to spread Islam in the world [a.k.a. jihad] is not war but a pious, just action and a religious duty." Hence, non-Muslims who obstruct their nation's Islamization must be considered aggressors. They are to blame for their resistance to Muslim conquest. Put differently, a non-Muslim who remains faithful to his own inherited tradition is ipso facto guilty of failing to accept the "truth" of Islam. By resisting Allah's will and compelling Muslims to wage jihad against them, they alone bear the full guilt for the hostilities."3 As Bat Ye'or comments, the logic espoused by the OIC is completely at odds with the secular values of the nations of the European Union.
There is in reality an unbridgeable gap between the way European scholars see both their own history of imperial conquest and Islam's. Although the facts are known by both the Europeans and their Muslim counterparts, Muslims see their own conquests as historically beneficial for both conquerors and conquered alike, beneficial to the conquered because defeat offered them the opportunity to convert to the sole true religion and serve the only true God. Since the whole world is considered a waqf, a trust bestowed by Allah, its Creator, on those who obey him, military conquest and the harsh measures inflicted upon the vanquished are entirely just. In reality, what non-believers regard as conquest is, in reality, restoration to its proper owners, since Islam regards the vanquished as the true usurpers.
Western scholars have tended to regard Western imperialism and conquest as the illegitimate seizure of what was not theirs. Hence, they often feel that they must make amends to formerly conquered peoples. Unfortunately, such expressions of guilt only confirm Muslims in their conviction that they have been the historically aggrieved party and that Islam has done no wrong it its conquests.
In reality, competent Western scholars have been fully aware of the history of Muslim aggression and conquest, but they have been reluctant to spell it out. It is government policy in both the EU and the United States to characterize acts of violence committed by Islamist terrorists as "extremism," as if there were no religious motivation involved. Thus, when on November 5, 2009, Major Nidal Hassan gunned down 45 service personnel, killing 13, at Fort Hood, Texas, while shouting, "Allahhu Akhbar," he was charged with murder and attempted murder but not terrorism.4 Unfortunately, authorities in the West are in extreme denial when it comes to identifying Islamist terrorism.
Bat Ye'or claims that such denial has been a deliberate strategic choice. In the case of the EU, it has served as the basis of a policy of rapprochement with the Arab and Muslim world for forty years. That policy has been implemented through multilateralism, namely, "the practice of coordinating national policies in groups of three or more states,"5 and multiculturalism, the doctrine that several different cultures can coexist as equals within a single state. Unfortunately, as Bat Ye'or argues, Europe's multiculturalism is more of a surrender of its own indigenous culture to Islam than genuine coexistence. Moreover, a principal aspect of that surrender has been the EU's intensified hostility toward Israel and, to a certain extent, the United States. Because of its unique history and the hazards of its geography, Israel could not possibly abandon its sovereignty as have the EU nations.
Given Israel's size in comparison to the vast territories conquered by Islam, Bat Ye'or asks, "Why would Muslims keep plotting to destroy Israel" and "do so with such poisonous hatred?" Why, she asks, "is Israel considered so alarming?" There have been many attempts to answer that question. This writer has attempted to offer an answer from social psychology, namely, the rage experienced by so many Muslims that a people whom they have known primarily as dhimmis and, as such, have been the objects of contempt and/or condescension for fourteen hundred years should have defeated Muslims militarily not once but several times since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.6
Undoubtedly there is more to it than that, and Bat Ye'or offers a very credible answer from the perspective of the history of religion and theology: "What Israel possesses is the Bible that Muhammad claimed was the unaltered version of the Koran (sic) uncreated and consubstantial with Allah before Jews and Christians falsified it" (emphasis added). The Muslim claim is astounding. Documents that were written in most instances more than as thousand years before Muhammad appeared on the scene are regarded in Islam as deliberate falsifications of the Qur'an. As is well known, there are irreconcilable discrepancies between narratives in the Bible and the Qur'an. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Patriarch Abraham is commanded by God to offer his son Isaac on Mt. Moriah in Jerusalem (Genesis 22:1–18). At a very early stage in the Islamic tradition it was determined that Abraham was commanded to sacrifice Ishmael, not Isaac, at Mount Mina near Mecca. Rejecting historical evidence, Muslims solved the discrepancy between the Bible and Qu'ran by claiming that the Qur'an was the original Torah and that Jews and Christians are guilty of tahrif, that is, distorting the actual biblical text or its meaning.
Moreover, as Bat Ye'or points out, while the land of the Bible is replete with the original names of the towns, villages, and places cited in the Bible, no town or village in Israel is mentioned in the Qur'an or in the biographies of Muhammad. Nevertheless, Muslims claim Palestine as an originally Muslim land usurped by the Hebrews in ancient times and once again by the Jews in modern times. As a result, any attempt to assert the historical connection of contemporary Israeli history and settlement with the Bible is regarded by Islam as a profound act of usurpation that must be terminated by the rightful possessors of the land, the Muslims.
Thus, there is in Islam an unconditional imperative to destroy Israel's history by destroying any trace of continuity between contemporary and ancient Israel in order to recover the land's alleged Islamic past. Nor can this be done without Islamizing Christian origins as well, which Muslims claim are properly depicted in the Qur'an and not in the Bible. Even when Muslims refer to the three "Abrahamitic" religions, ostensibly as a means of facilitating dialogue, they are not creating a neutral space where Jews, Christians, and Muslims can meet as equals, something that Jewish and Christian partners in dialogue tend to overlook. As Bat Ye'or reminds us, Muslims insist that Abraham is a prophet of Islam rather than a Patriarch and "the father of many nations…" (Gen. 17:5) Similarly, Jesus is Isa, also a prophet of Islam, and not the divine-human person of the Trinity.
Since the Israeli victory in the Six Day War of 1967 and especially after the 1973 War, Europeans have tended to call Israelis, "colonizers" and "occupiers." They thereby deny any Jewish historical or religious connection to the land in spite of both the testimony of the Bible and the accumulated evidence of excavations, artifacts, inscriptions, and ancient manuscripts from the Biblical period testifying to its Hebrew roots. By contrast, there is neither effort nor serious interest among Muslims to find concrete evidence validating their claims about the Qur'an as the original document. Of course, no such scientific or scholarly validation is necessary because of the dogmatic character of Islam's claims and the harsh penalties that can be inflicted on those who publicly question such claims.
For two millennia, Jewish memory of the loss of Jerusalem and the Land of Israel and yearning for its restoration have been expressed in daily and Holy Day prayers and ritual. Moreover, there has been a deep Christian attachment to the land, the prophets, and the heroes of Israel. Unfortunately, there have been Palestinian Christians and their Western accomplices who today are more than willing to cooperate in denying any intrinsic connection between the Bible and modern Israel. As I read about these efforts, I was reminded of the efforts of the Nazi-era Deutsche Christen to de-Judaize Scripture, nor, as we shall see, is the connection far-fetched.
Having offered a theological explanation of Muslim attempts to deny any connection between contemporary Israel and its biblical counterpart, Bat Ye'or turns to the subject of Europe's cooperation with Muslim hostility to both Israel and Jews. She claims that the European Community's Arab policy was situated "in a precise, strategic, coordinated framework called the Euro-Arab Dialogue" that was in turn the fruit of agreements between the nine EEC governments and the countries of the Arab League in 1973–1975. That framework defined a semi-official, quasi-secret policy that had the effect of transforming Europe politically and demographically into Eurabia. Her pathfinding views were first published in French in December 2002 in an article "The Euro-Arab Dialogue and the Birth of Eurabia."7 They have since been expanded in 2005 in a book, Eurabia,8 in which she argued that the mass Muslim immigration that began in the 1970s fit into a European ideology that aimed at the creation of a unified Euro-Arab Mediterranean civilization, Eurabia. Her analysis rejected the conventional wisdom that Muslim immigration, an unprecedented demographic upheaval, was a consequence of European guilt for the Holocaust and the determination not to turn its back on the contemporary victims of economic and political misfortune. Inevitably, the introduction of a very large population, ethnically and religiously alien to the European mainstream, resulted in considerable opposition from elements of the indigenous population. This led to the accusation that those opposed to the mass Muslim migration were guilty of the same sort of racism that led to the Holocaust.
In reality, the extermination of Europe's Jews in 1940–1945 and the mass migration of Muslims to Europe starting in the 1970s were in no sense comparable. Mass Muslim migration, the demographic outcome of Eurabia, grew out of a Euro-Arab alliance against Israel that was allied to an Arab policy whose unconditional objective was Israel's destruction. The Euro-Arab alliance was the source of a fundamentally Judaeophobic policy and culture in Europe, complete with attacks on Jewish targets perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists working under the protection of European police and security services, at a time when a former officer Reinhard Heydrich's Sicherheitsdienst, Paul Dickopf, was president of Interpol (1968-1972). We return to Dickopf and his Nazi associates below.
The creation of Eurabia entailed a Euro-Arab alliance that sought with considerable success to revive European anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, its fundamental objectives were far more encompassing. It sought to replace Europe's nation states with an order of world governance managed by unelected, unaccountable international bodies.
Although the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) negotiations that led to the creation of Eurabia have never been made public, according to Bat Ye'or, the movement is known to have started in France in the 1960s among the French Catholic left and the Quai D'Orsay, the French Foreign Office. These organizations sponsored pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Europe, Lebanon, and Cairo that recalled the collaboration of Nazi and Fascist regimes in the 1930s and during World War II with Muslim political and religious leaders.
According to Bat Ye'or, during the war, the Germans found that Muslim defectors and prisoners of war from a region then known as Soviet Turkestan, but comprising present-day Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, bitterly resented their communist overlords and saw the Nazis as liberators.9 The Nazis also found a powerful ally in Haj Amin al-Huseini, Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1937. After participating in the leadership of a failed, pro-Nazi coup in Iraq in May 1941, the Mufti made his way to Berlin, with a brief stay in Rome, during which he met Benito Mussolini. Upon arriving in Berlin, he had a 95-minute meeting with Hitler that was attended by Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister. The Mufti established his wartime headquarters, the Büro des Grossmufti, in Berlin and actively cooperated in the creation and indoctrination of a Muslim Waffen SS division in Bosnia in 1941. In addition to his meetings with Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS, the Mufti was in close contact with officers of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the SS organization directly responsible for the implementation of the so-called Final Solution.10
In addition to the British, the Muslims and the Nazis had two other common enemies, the Soviet Union and the Jews. After the war, some of the most committed Nazis, such as Johan von Leers, who converted to Islam, and Alois Brünner, continued the war against the Jews in Egypt and Syria. In the 1960s, the Quai d'Orsay and the French Catholic Left sponsored numerous pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Europe, Lebanon, and Cairo. These activities reawakened the Euro-Arab relationships that had fostered active wartime collaboration between the Nazi and Fascist regimes in Europe and Arab religious and political leaders, especially the Palestinians. This renewed activism recalled the Nazi-Muslim partnership that developed during the war against the Soviet Union. In 1941 Hitler had appointed Alfred Rosenberg Head of the Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete (Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories). His colleague, Gerhard von Mende, director of the Ostministerium, the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, became the architect of the collaboration between the Wehrmacht and the battalions made up of defecting Muslim soldiers from a region that today comprises Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan..
In spite of German-Jewish rapprochement, especially under Chancellor Wily Brandt (1963-1974), former Nazis and their sympathizers found places at the highest levels of the German and French governments. A sense of solidarity was revived between the former Nazis and their collaborators and their wartime Arab partners in enmity toward both America and the Jews. This development was encouraged by the Quai d'Orsay that regarded the possibility of a Euro-Arab alliance as a means of diminishing and eventually eliminating American influence in Europe,
In November 1970, in a lecture given in Cairo, Georges Montaron, editor of the left-wing Catholic journal, Témoignage chétien, offered his formula for countering the pro-Israel sentiment then largely prevalent in the countries of the European Union. He told his audience: "If you manage to make authentic Frenchmen or authentic Englishmen be at the same time authentic Eastern Arabs, how great will then be your influence." Montaron was correct. Massive Muslim immigration into Europe was an important factor in transforming European politics and diplomacy. He was, however, mistaken in assuming that the vast majority of Arab immigrants had any interest in becoming "authentic Frenchmen or authentic Englishmen." As Bat Ye'or makes clear, Muslims did not come to Europe to assimilate to Western secular culture. Willy-nilly, the effect of the unprecedented mass migration was to resume a 1400 year old struggle for Islamic religio-political dominance and it is Bat Ye'or's contention that they are largely succeeding.
Montaron's Cairo speech was an indication of what some European elites were thinking, but more than a lecture was necessary to effect the transformation. Israel's victory in the Six Day War of June 1967 can arguably be seen as one of the turning points. In the 1950s, there was a tacit alliance between France and Israel. France was Israel's principal weapons supplier. Most of the Israeli aircraft employed in the 1967 war were manufactured by the French firm of Dassault. Moreover, the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona was built with French cooperation and assistance in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The tacit French-Israeli alliance coincided with the bitter counter-insurgency war France fought to suppress the Algerian independence movement. When the war ended, De Gaulle attempted to maintain his ties to Israel while cultivating political and economic relations with the Arabs. The balancing act became untenable with the Arab-Israeli war. De Gaulle announced his pro-Arab choice in his semi-annual press interview on November 25, 1967, in which he denounced Israel for its preemptive strike against its Arab enemies and characterized the Jews as "an elite people, self-assured and domineering." As Raymond Aaron later wrote, "General de Gaulle has knowingly and deliberately initiated a new phase in Jewish history and perhaps of anti-Semitism." As Aaron, previously a political ally of De Gaulle understood, De Gaulle was not interested in separating anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism. He was putting the Jews of France on notice. From then on, France took the lead in fostering a Euro-Arab alliance based on hostility to Israel, the United States, and Europe's Jews.
Having failed to defeat the Israelis militarily in the 1973 war, the Arabs turned to their "oil weapon." A series of hikes in the price of crude oil were combined with an embargo against the shipment of petroleum to the United States, which had supplied Israel with replacement weapons to counter Soviet shipments to Egypt and Syria. The oil embargo was also enforced against those countries, such as the Netherlands, that had permitted American aircraft carrying military supplies to Israel to refuel at their air bases. NATO allies that had refused to permit U.S. aircraft to refuel, such as Britain, France, and Germany were exempt from the embargo. The countries of the European Community quickly fell into line and adopted a uniformly hostile policy toward Israel.
According to Bat Ye'or, October 1973 is a "key date" when Europe definitely took sides "with the Arab League's jihad against the Jewish state." On November 6, 1973, the EC issued its Brussels Declaration calling upon Israel to withdraw to its 1949 armistice lines, a call echoed by President Barack Obama in 2012. The EC also officially recognized the "rights" of the Palestinians whom Bat Ye'or points out were in fact a "newly created people" hitherto known simply as Arabs. In the same month, a British and a French parliamentarian began an initiative whose purpose was to improve Europe's relations with the Arab world. The two organized a conference in Paris in March 1975 that brought together 33 parliamentarians from seven of the nine EC countries and was the origin of the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation (PAEAC).
Out of the PAEAC came the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD), characterized by Bat Ye'or as "the founding body of Eurabia." Arab parliamentarians set up a counterpart organization to the PAEAC, the Arab Inter-Parliamentarian Union (AIPU) to reinforce cooperation between the Arabs and the Europeans. The policies were especially supported by Arab Christians, some of whose religious leaders sought to employ a specious "Palestinian liberation theology" to separate Christianity from Judaism and Islamize Christianity.
The pro-Arab policy was strongly backed by France and Germany, Nevertheless, before the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a number of EC countries did not share the French and German policies. In addition to the oil embargo, it took a series of plane hijackings and repeated Palestinian acts of terror on European soil to convince hitherto reluctant European nations to conclude alliances with the Arab League countries which included the following points of agreement:
- Recognition of the PLO at a time when the latter organization's charter rejected the very existance of Israel.
- Cooling off of relations with United States as a condition of Euro-Arab rapprochement.
- And, politically the most consequential, approval of a policy of large-scale Arab immigration into Europe.
In addition, European Jews and their institutions were subjected to attacks in public places and schools partly facilitated by indifferent public authorities. Or so it seems, but we now know that there was active connivance on the part of important European authorities with Palestinian and other Muslim terrorists. Bat Ye'or makes known something of the extent of the malicious betrayal of a community that was under the illusion that they enjoyed the protection of their own government on territory under its control. For example, at the end of the war, the Italian government offered all Jews on Italian soil full citizenship. Almost all declined. They understood that in times of stress, citizenship as a minority in a European nation-state might prove as worthless as had been that of Germany's Jews.
The sad wisdom was partially validated by a July 8, 2008 interview in Corriere della Sera by Francesco Cossiga, who served in a series of Italian government positions from 1976 to 1992 as minister of the interior, prime minister, president of the Senate, president of the republic, and senator for life. In the interview, Cossiga revealed the existence of an agreement dating from the early 1970s between Prime Minister Aldo Moro and Yasser Arafat's PLO in which the PLO was granted the freedom to come and go, as well as stock weapons on Italian soil, in exchange for immunity for Italy's domestic and foreign interests. Cossiga admitted that Italian Jews had been excluded from that protection.11, 12 The results were soon forthcoming. On October 9, 1982, six terrorists fired on members of Rome's Great Synagogue, wounding dozens and killing a two year old child. The congregation's police protection had been withdrawn several hours before the attack. There were other such attacks. One of the worst was the Strage di Bologna (Massacre at the Bologna Railway Station) in which 85 were killed and 200 wounded. Italian authorities blamed Neo-Fascists, but in his interview Cossiga acknowledged that the railroad station explosion was an accident and that the real perpetrators were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who intended to target Jews, not Italians, with their explosives. The Italian government made no attempt to prosecute the perpetrators. In December 1985, Palestinian terrorists killed sixteen people and wounded thirteen at the El Al ticket counter at the Rome airport. (Bat Ye'or incorrectly writes that "eighty people" were killed, but the pattern was the same. According to Cossiga, Italian security agencies received prior warning of the attack but did not bother to share their information with the Israelis.)13
There were other horror stories, nor were they confined to Italy. The massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics was one of the most spectacular Palestinian terror attacks. On July 23, 2012, the German newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, revealed that "Explicit warnings that a terrorist attack might take place at the 1972 Munich Olympics."14 On the basis of "previously classified documents" made available to Der Spiegel by various official agencies, the journal was able to assert that there were extraordinary efforts to cover up the extent of the failure of German authorities to prevent the murder of the Israelis. There had been a number of accurate warnings that an Olympic attack was being planned. For example, the same issue of Der Spiegel noted that on August 14, 1972, three weeks before the games, a German embassy officer in Beirut reported that "an incident would be staged by from (sic) the Palestinian side during the Olympic Games in Munich." On September 2, three days before the athletes were taken hostage, the Italian publication Gente wrote that Black September were planning a "sensational act during the Olympic Games." The prediction proved accurate, but it was ignored for several days by German authorities.
The unwillingness of German authorities to act upon available information concerning the peril facing the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics becomes more understandable when one considers the role of so-called "former" Nazis in both the German police and Interpol. Bay Ye'or draws our attention to Paul Dickopf (1910 -1973). As a young man in the nineteen-thirties, Dickopf was a fully committed Nazi, a member of both the Sturmabteilung (Brown Shirts) and the SS. He began his police career in 1937 in the Kriminal-Polizei (Kripo) which during the Third Reich was under the control of the SS. In 1939, Dickopf, by then an officer, became a member of the general SS. There is little record of his wartime activities because his SS file for the period is, not surprisingly, incomplete.
After the war, Dickopf continued his police career. As Bat Ye'or points out, in 1965 Dickopf became head of the German criminal police, Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), and from 1968 to 1972 served as president of Interpol, a position he got with the support of the Arab States. His former Nazi connections proved no obstacle. It is worth noting that in 1938, Interpol, previously headquartered in Vienna, was moved to Berlin at the time of the Anschluss. Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the agency responsible for the implementation of the Final Solution, became Interpol's president. After his assassination in 1942, he was succeeded by Arthur Nebe, a senior SS officer who played a major role in the extermination of both Jews and Gypsies. Nebe was succeeded as President in 1943 by Ernst Kaltenbruner, condemned to death at the Nuremberg trials. According to Bat Ye'or, under Dickopf, "Interpol did nothing to stop [Arab] terrorism, nor the wave of hijacked planes and the 1972 Munich massacre of the Israeli athletes."15 There were, according to Bat Ye'or, strong ties between pro-Nazi and other Fascist elements in European politics and society and their erstwhile Arab allies and this helps to explain the willingness of the Europeans to weaken their own culture in order to come to accommodate the Muslims at Israel's expense.
Bat Ye'or also characterizes the EU's appeasement policy as "Palestinization." Unelected EU officials sought to create a common domestic and foreign policy for the states on both sides of the Mediterranean. It was, of course, an impossible enterprise. There was no way that the policies of the relatively secular EU nations that extend full equality of status to Muslims could be harmonized with those of the Muslim nations in which only Islam has full legitimacy and whose ultimate objective is to create a world in which Islam is universally dominant.
The obvious contradiction between the Enlightenment culture of Europe and its Muslim partners does not appear to trouble the European leadership. The endemic, religiously legitimated violence present in Muslim societies has been habitually explained as due to "root causes," such as the alleged humiliation, deprivation, and "injustice" caused by the Israeli occupation of what is claimed to be Arab land. Unlike post-war Germany that finally came to accept defeat and which makes no right-of-return claims, vis-à-vis formerly German lands and settlements, the Palestinians, and for that matter, a goodly portion of the Muslim world has been unable to regard the military strength of the Israelis, gained in the face of constantly repeated threats of annihilation, as anything but injustice and undeserved humiliation. There are, of course, good reasons, both political and religious, for the refusal. For the Palestinians to accept defeat, they would have had to experience a breakdown as complete as was the German defeat in 1945, but that came after two horrendous world wars, the bloodiest in human history. And, the principal contenders in the European war shared a common religious inheritance that even National Socialism could not obliterate.
The Israelis and Palestinians share no common religious inheritance and the Palestinians have a theological motive for a permanent state of war. It is succinctly stated in Article 11 of the Charter of Hamas: "…the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day." The Charter further states: "This Waqf remains as long as earth and heaven remain."16 There is no place for secularized wiggle room here. Moreover, as Bat Ye'or points out, the "root causes" strategy has a further utility. It allows the perpetrators and their accomplices to shift blame to their victims. A similar strategy is effective in the widespread attempt to criminalize "Islamophobia" so that the accusation can serve as a strategic weapon with which Muslims seek to control what can and cannot be said about Islam. This is evident in the efforts of the OIC and its western allies to get the UN to declare Islamophobia a punishable crime. And, as we have seen, the alleged "root causes" are said to be the poverty, humiliation, frustration, and "injustice" that the Israelis have alleged to have inflicted upon the Palestinians.
According to Bat Ye'or, a major consequence of the EU's attempt to utilize unelected networks of parliamentarians, bureaucrats and assorted other participants in the Euro-Arab Dialogue to harmonize important aspects of EU domestic and foreign policy with those of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has been the subordination of European policy and even sovereignty to the OIC. While the EU has worked earnestly to accommodate the religious, cultural and political demands of the OIC, there has been absolutely no reciprocity. For example, Muslim are free to practice and proselytize their religion in Europe, but no such freedom exists for Christians in Muslim lands. Bat Ye'or argues that the EU has had "zero influence" in the Muslim world, whereas the EU has made every attempt to accommodate Muslim religious and political sensibilities. Put simply, since the 1970s the Europeans have been acting like dhimmis in their own countries. And, central to this Christian-Muslim rapprochement has been the claim, continually asserted by the OIC and parroted by the EU, that Israel is the principal instigator of "war, terror, and injustice" throughout the world.17 In spite of a history of fourteen hundred years of Christian-Muslim conflict and combat, the newly reconciled EU holds that "Israel is the only obstacle to peace between Islam and Christianity." The result has been that de facto, if not de jure, the OIC seems to be "restoring in the 21st Century the Caliphate, the Supreme Controlling body of all Muslims."
Bat Ye'or is not optimistic about the future of Europe and, to some extent, an Obama-led United States. She shares her concerns with her readers In her conclusion:
While writing this study I was reminded of a question that greatly troubled me twenty-five years ago when researching Les Chrétientés d'Orient entre jihad et dhimmitude (1991). How did Christian peoples and states, some with powerful armies and the richest cultures of their times, collapse when faced with the onslaught of jihad and dhimmitude from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries? Now I no longer ask myself this question. The breakdown process that I used to study and documented in old chronicles I have seen taking place in today's Europe. When I examined the past I saw it repeated in the present, under my very eyes. Indeed, the present situation is reminiscent of the one that followed the Muslim conquests. Keeping Christian officials in their positions maintained a semblance of continuity. Behind their foggy screen, Islamization could penetrate within every stratum of the vanquished societies. However, with time, the collapse of this edifice revealed the true role of these ministers, whose job was to enforce upon their people the caliphate's orders, under pain of death. I was missing one essential link in the chain of events: the motivations of human beings that lead them in an unswerving direction within the chaos of events, the undeviating route toward an ultimate objective. Now this link is revealed in the mix of fears, cowardice, corruption, hatred and short-term ambitions that within the space of forty years have led Europe along the road to Eurabia, an interim stage in an even more profound change.
Bat Ye'or has once again written an important book that both requires and rewards diligent study. She has uncovered a process, largely hidden from public view, by which the national identity of the nations of Europe is in the process of being progressively and surreptitiously wiped out while the religio-political identity of the Muslim ummah is being unified and strengthened through the OIC and the UN with its fifty-six Muslim member nations. The goals of the OIC, which Bat Ye'or characterizes as "the modern associative Caliphate," are clear, global Muslim religio-political supremacy and the destruction of Israel. She has warned us that it has happened before and that conditions are ripe for a contemporary repetition.
[1] Niall Ferguson, "The End of Europe?", The American Enterprise Institute Bradley Lecture, Washington, March 1, 2004.
[2]. Littman, op. cit.
[3] Bat Ye'or, Europe, Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson, University Press, 2011), p. 3; see Bassam Tibi, "War and Peace in Islam" in Sohail H. Hashimi, ed., Islamic Political Ethics, Civil Society, Pluralism, and Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 175-93.
[4] Scott Swett, "Learning the Wrong Lessons From the Fort Hood Massacre," The American Thinker, February 27, 2012, .
[5] Robert O. Keohane,. "Multilateralism: An Agenda for Research." International Journal, 45 (Autumn 1990), p. 731.
[6] Richard L. Rubenstein, Jihad and Genocide (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010) pp. 155-188..
[7] Bat Ye'or, "Le dialogue Euro-Arabe et la naissance d'Eurabia," Observatoire du monde juif, Bulletin no. 4/5, December 2002, 44–55. Translated into English as "The Euro-Arab Dialogue and The Birth of Eurabia," at www.dhimmitude.org/d_today_eurabia.html .
[8] Bat Ye'or, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson, University Press, 2005), French (2006), Italian (2007), Dutch (2007), and Hebrew (2008).
[9] Ye'or, Bat (2011-09-16). Europe, Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate (p. 56). Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Kindle Edition.
[10] Ian Johnson, A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Kindle Edition, 2010), p 6.
[11].See Richard L. Rubenstein, ). Jihad and Genocide (Studies in Genocide: Religion, History, and Human Rights) (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010, Kindle Edition). P.80.
[12] See Caroline Glick, "Our World: The Convenient War Against the Jews," Jerusalem Post, October 8, 2008, http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=116647
[13] See also, Bat Ye'or: "New Evidence on Eurabia," New English Review, September 4, 2012.
[14] Caroline Glick, op. cit.
[15] Spiegel Online International, "Officials Ignored Warnings of Terrorist Attack," July 23, 2012.
[16] Bat Ye'or, Europe, Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate, p. 27.
[17] The Avalon Project, "The Charter of Hamas."
[18] Bat Ye'or, Europe, Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate, p. 143, Kindle edition
Richard L. Rubenstein is President Emeritus of the University of Bridgeport. His latest book is Jihad and Genocide (Rowman and Littlefield: 2011).
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text:
New York-The State of Learning (Chapter 655 Report):an annual report to
the Governor and the Legislature on the educational status of the State's schools. The
current edition was submitted in June 2002. The report discusses school demographics,
enrollment patterns, school finance and resources, characteristics of school personnel,
student performance, high school completion, and trends in postsecondary enrollment. Data
are provided for the State, for groups of similiar districts, and for individual
districts. The report is published in two volume: Statewide Profile of the Educational
System and Statistical Profiles of Public School Districts. (Cost
Computer File: the district data published in Statistical Profiles of Public School Districts, available on 3.5" or 5.25" diskettes. (Cost: $25.00)
For each publication, please indicate the number of copies desired. Prices include UPS postage and handling (UPS does not deliver to post office boxes). Checks should be made payable to New York State Education Department and send to the following address:
New York State Education Department
Room 309 - Education Building
Albany, NY 12234
(518) 474-3806
Name _______________________________________________________ Address _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ Phone Number _______________________________________________________ Publication Unit Cost Number Item Cost New York: The State of Learning paper copy (2 volume set) $12.50 _______ _________ District data: 3.5" diskette $25.00 _______ _________ 5.25" diskette $25.00 _______ _________ Total Cost _________
NOTE: Payment must be included with order form; purchase orders cannot be
accepted. All returned checks are subject to a $20.00 collection fee.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
The day after: Pyeongchang breathes, bids Olympics farewell
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — From volunteers to support staff to the joint Korea women's hockey team, people from many cultures bid farewell to each other and to the 2018 Winter Olympics on Monday as a swath of the eastern Korean Peninsula readied itself for something novel: relative normalcy.
Seven years after a successful Olympic bid that changed its people and its landscape forever, Pyeongchang exhaled.
"Farewell! Bye bye! Gamsahamnida!" volunteers using the Korean word for "thank you" shouted to departing buses in Gangneung, the coastal city near Pyeongchang where many events were held.
Workers yanked down paper signs by the hundreds and busloads of Olympians, journalists and support workers rolled toward train stations and highways Monday in the aftermath of a Winter Games that was as political as it was athletic.
International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach echoed that sentiment in the closing ceremony Sunday night, saying that the centerpiece political event of the games — a joint Koreas team marching together and, in some cases, competing together was a beacon for a troubled world.
"With your joint march you have shared your faith in a peaceful future with all of us," Bach said. "You have shown our sport brings people together in our very fragile world. You have shown how sport builds bridges."
The Korean women's hockey team did that for sure.
Thrown together a just few weeks before the games, players from North and South were thrust together to make a go of it. With the help of their Canadian coach, they came together as a competent, if not particularly effective, team that captured the attention of many Olympics watchers.
Along the way, they developed what they uniformly say was camaraderie, and even great affection. On Monday morning, at the athletes' village, they said their goodbyes with tears and extended hands.
"I feel really strange," said South Korean hockey player Choi Ji-yeon. "I told them to take care and not get sick and meet again later."
She added: "If they were people whom we can continue to keep in touch and meet again, then I would feel better, but I might never be able to meet them again."
Their governmental counterparts were showing signs of communication as well. The detente achieved through the Olympic connections between North and South Korea fits the longtime goals of the South's president, Moon Jae-in, who has advocated engagement with Kim Jong Un's Pyongyang regime.
That happened at the opening and closing ceremonies, both with U.S. representatives looking on from nearby — Vice President Mike Pence for the opening, first daughter and presidential adviser Ivanka Trump for the closing Sunday night.
U.S. President Donald Trump's administration, a patron of South Korea and a loud opponent of the North's nuclear program, is watching the contacts closely, particularly after South Korea's presidential office said during the closing ceremony that the North was willing to hold talks with the United States.
Washington viewed that development warily. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, with Ivanka Trump on her South Korea Olympic trip, issued a written statement to that effect after the closing ceremony.
"We will see if Pyongyang's message today, that it is willing to hold talks, represents the first steps along the path to denuclearization," she said. "In the meantime, the United States and the world must continue to make clear that North Korea's nuclear and missile programs are a dead end."
North Korea's official news agency, KCNA, known for its invective toward the United States and the Seoul government, has been playing it low key when it comes to these Olympics. On Monday, it issued a synopsis of the games that was notable for its anodyne tone.
"When the players of the north and south of Korea participating in the 23rd Winter Olympics and other players and agents of different countries and region from across the world entered the stadium, the spectators welcomed them with applause," it practically whispered.
Contrast that with this dispatch hours earlier about the United States: "We will never have face-to-face talks with them even after 100 years or 200 years. This is neither an empty talk nor any threat. The U.S. will have to pay dearly for stupid and wild vituperation."
Twelve hours later, news of its willingness to talk emerged from Seoul.
As for the Olympics and the attention and people they bring to this relatively remote plateau of northeastern South Korea, it's not quite finished yet. The Paralympic Games, held immediately after the Olympics using the same facilities, will be staged from March 9 to 18, albeit with a lower profile and attendance.
But for a few days, at least, with traffic cones down and most Olympic checkpoints removed, Pyeongchang can take a breather as the eyes of the world shift somewhere else.


text:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
And I'm David Greene. Good morning. We are learning more details about the woman who rammed her car into a White House security barrier yesterday. Her name is Miriam Carey. She's from Stamford, Connecticut. She was fatally shot after leading police on a chase from the White House to the U.S. Capitol. Her mother has told ABC News that she was battling depression. In yesterday's chaos, two law enforcement officers were injured, and one has been treated and released from a hospital. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang has the latest.
HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: The suspect's mother says Miriam Carey was suffering from postpartum depression, following the birth of her daughter last August. Carey drove a black Infiniti with Connecticut license plates and a one-year-old passenger. She slammed her car into a barricade and a Secret Service officer at the edge of the White House grounds before fleeing towards Capitol Hill. Secret Service agent Ed Donovan spoke at a press conference yesterday.
AGENT ED DONOVAN: There were multiple crime scenes as a result of the vehicle fleeing. There were multiple shots fired at several different locations.
WANG: D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier said checkpoints at the White House and the Capitol were effective.
POLICE CHIEF CATHY LANIER: They did exactly what they were supposed to do, and they stopped a suspect from breaching the security perimeters, both in a vehicle - I mean, in a vehicle at both locations.
WANG: The car crashed just outside the Capitol grounds. Officers said the suspect was pronounced dead after a final round of gunfire. Justin Herman, a federal employee, lives near the crash site.
JUSTIN HERMAN: I'm a furloughed employee so I'm home. I'm down in my apartment. And all of a sudden I hear a loud bang, and all of a sudden I see: Shots fired at the Capitol come across on Twitter. And as soon as I saw that, then I heard boom boom boom boom boom boom boom as, like, clips are unloading.
WANG: David Loewenberg also lives nearby. He said after he heard gunfire outside his home, he walked toward a guard post by one of the Capitol office buildings.
DAVID LOWENBERG: And I could make out kind of a black car on the other side of the guard post. So I could only see part of it. And then a few seconds later I saw a police officer with his or her arms around a small child and taking that child away from the scene.
WANG: Law enforcement officers say the one-year-old girl was found in the suspect's vehicle uninjured. She was later taken to a local hospital and is now in protective custody.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: The shelter-in-place order has been cancelled. Additional information will follow.
WANG: A shelter-in-place order was imposed on buildings around the complex until Capitol Police lifted the order about an hour later. Trickles of office workers and tourists eventually emerged onto the Capitol grounds. Congressman Juan Vargas of California said he was approaching from the train station when he heard...
REPRESENTATIVE JUAN VARGAS: Pop, pop. But I didn't think anything of it, to be honest. As I kept walking, that's when a police officer comes running frantically towards me and told me to stop. And he goes you've got a shelter in place.
WANG: Lauren Bladen-White works a few blocks north. She sheltered in her office building's basement with more than 30 co-workers. She said the scene she saw outside after the incident was surreal.
LAUREN BLADEN-WHITE: Capitol Police officers with their guns drawn running down the street, and the emergency vehicles and, you know, unmarked cars. And just in an instant, everything was shut down around here.
WANG: Corey Arume from Hawaii was at the Capitol with his wife and two daughters. Officers shooed them a few blocks away, so they had to settle for a more distant view. And safety was not a major concern.
COREY ARUME: If you could see how many cops with machine guns standing on that road, feel pretty safe.
WANG: Officials say the incident was isolated, and they think it had nothing to do with terrorism. Details are still emerging as the investigation continues. Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.


text:
some thoughts on politics
Despite the storm in UK politics recently, I've held back from sharing my views on the blog and social media. I'm not quite sure why – last year I was pretty emotionally open about it all on here. I made it clear I was pro-remain and vehemently anti-Trump and believe me, my silence this time round hasn't meant any lack of political passion this year either.
So I'll be honest with you now – I was nothing short of THRILLED that Labour won more seats in the election last week. I feel it's a huge step towards a more compassionate society – one where everyone matters and where vital services like the NHS are protected. I also think it's a huge slap in the face to Theresa May's hard Brexit and the way she was pursuing it and, as someone who values togetherness and collaboration, I think that is a very good thing.
I love all the talk about the youth standing up to be counted, the thought that our population is more engaged and politically active and the belief that the hate-soaked tabloids are losing their power over the electorate. That last thought alone is enough to make me dance in the streets. There is much in all of this to celebrate.
But, man alive, what about this proposed Tory coalition with the DUP?!!!! Their party is sickeningly homophobic, denies climate change, wants to teach creationism as scientific fact, reintroduce the death penalty and is not only anti- abortion but wants to criminalise any one who offers or seeks advice about it. It beggars belief. And even though I can't honestly see any of these beliefs radically impacting on policy (I have more faith in our Conservative MP's than to think they would back-track on gay marriage or our right to choose etc – I hope I'm right on that) I think to allow the balance of power to lie with the DUP gives such abhorrent views a dangerous legitimacy.
I also understand there are grave concerns in Northern Ireland about how this could unsettle the peace process there. I can't pretend to have much of an understanding in this area (although I've been doing a bit of reading this weekend) but I've heard this alliance called dangerous and irresponsible. There are rumblings in the Conservative party's own ranks let alone in wider parliament.
Personally, I'd question the extent to which a minority Tory government propped up by the DUP could be genuinely representative of the views of the British people. I may be a lefty myself but I've spoken to Conservative voting friends over the weekend and they're appalled by the DUP's views too. All told, the coalition feels desperate and unsafe. To many it doesn't even feel legitimate.
So where does that leave us? What's going to happen next? Will we have a new Prime Minister by the end of the week? A date for another general election by the end of the month? An entirely new government by the end of the year? Who knows?!
Anyway, I thought I would share this drawing I did. It's about sticking together to face whatever life throws at you. Braving the storm no matter what. I think we're going to need to.


text:
I was investigating primes with the property that the sum of the first $n$ primes is divisible by $p_n$. It turns out that these primes are extremely extremely rare. For primes less than $10^9$, I have found that there are only five primes with this property:
$$ p_1 = 2 $$
$$ p_3 = 5 $$
$$ p_{20} = 71 $$
$$ p_{31464} = 369,119 $$
$$ p_{22096548} = 415,074,643 $$
This raises the curious and equivalent questions:
Q1. Are there infinitely many primes which divide the sum of all the preceding primes?
Q2. Even if we assume that there are infinitely many such primes, why are they so rare? In other words, why do primes dislike dividing the sum of all the preceding primes? Is there any heuristic argument to show that such primes will indeed be extremely rare?


text:
The U.S. (and Britain) began bombing the Afghan capital of Kabul on October 7, 2001 with Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from warships and submarines and bombs dropped from warplanes and shortly thereafter American special forces began ground operations, a task that has been conducted since by regular Army and Marine units. The bombing and the ground combat operations continue more than eight years later and both will be intensified to record levels in short order.
The combined U.S. and NATO forces would represent a staggering number, in excess of 150,000 soldiers. By way of comparison, as of September of this year there were approximately 120,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and only a small handful of other nations' personnel, those assigned to the NATO Training Mission – Iraq, remaining with them.
"Secretary Gates has made clear that the conflicts we're in should be at the very forefront of our agenda. He wants to make sure we're not giving up capabilities needed now for those needed for some unknown future conflict. He wants to make sure the Pentagon is truly on war footing….For the first time in decades, the political and economic stars are aligned for a fundamental overhaul of the way the Pentagon does business."
Over the past ten years citizens of the United States and other Western nations, and unfortunately most of the world, have become accustomed to Washington and its military allies in Europe and those appointed as armed outposts on the periphery of the "Euro-Atlantic community" engaging in armed aggression around the world.
Wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq and lower profile military operations and surrogate campaigns in nations as diverse as Colombia, Yemen, the Philippines, Ivory Coast, Somalia, Chad, the Central African Republic, South Ossetia and elsewhere have become an unquestioned prerogative of the U.S. and its NATO partners. So much so that many have forgotten to consider how comparable actions have been or might be viewed if a non-Western nation attempted them.
Thirty years ago this December 24 the first Soviet troops entered Afghanistan to assist a neighboring nation's government to combat an armed insurgency based in Pakistan and surreptitiously (later quite openly) supported by the United States.
In the waning days of that year, 1979, and in the early ones of the following Soviet troop strength grew to some 50,000 soldiers.
(In 1839 Britain invaded Afghanistan with 21,000 of its own and Indian colonial troops and in 1878 with twice that number to counter Russian influence in the country in what came to be called the Great Game.)
On January 23, 1980 U.S. President James Earl (Jimmy) Carter stated in his last State of the Union Address that "The implications of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan could pose the most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War."
When the Soviet Union began withdrawing its forces from the nation – the first half from May 15 to August 16, 1988 and the last from November 15, 1988 to February 15, 1989 – their peak number had been slightly over 100,000.
On December 1 of 2009 U.S. President Barack Obama announced that he was deploying 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan in addition to the 68,000 already there and two days later "Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Congress…that the surge force of 30,000 going to Afghanistan will grow to at least 33,000 when support troops are included." [1]
That is, over 100,000 troops. Along with private military and security contractors whose number is even larger.
Soviet troops were in Afghanistan barely over nine years. American troops are now involved in the ninth year of combat operations in the country and in less than four weeks will be engaged in their tenth calendar year of war there.
On November 25 White House spokesman Robert Gibbs assured the people of his nation that "We are in year nine of our efforts in Afghanistan. We are not going to be there another eight or nine years." [2] The implication is that the U.S. may wage a war in Afghanistan that could last until 2017. For sixteen years.
The longest war in American history prior to the current one was that in Vietnam. U.S. military advisers were present in the country from the late 1950s onward and covert operations were carried on in the early 1960s, but only in the year after the contrived Gulf of Tonkin incident – 1965 – did the Pentagon begin major combat operations in the south and regular bombing raids in the north. The last American combat unit left South Vietnam in 1972, seven years later.
The U.S. (and Britain) began bombing the Afghan capital of Kabul on October 7, 2001 with Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from warships and submarines and bombs dropped from warplanes and shortly thereafter American special forces began ground operations, a task that has been conducted since by regular Army and Marine units. The bombing and the ground combat operations continue more than eight years later and both will be intensified to record levels in short order.
Since late last summer the U.S. and its NATO allies have launched regular drone missile and attack helicopter assaults inside Pakistan. Had the Soviets attempted to do likewise thirty years ago – when their own borders were threatened – Washington's response might well have triggered a third world war.
The USSR did not deploy troops from any of its fellow Warsaw Pact nations in Afghanistan during the 1980s. In a historical irony that warrants more commentary that it has received – none – every one of those nations now has forces serving under NATO and killing and dying in the Afghan war theater: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and the former German Democratic Republic (subsumed under a united Federal Republic, which has almost 4,500 soldiers stationed there).
They are among troops from close to 50 nations serving or soon to serve under NATO command on the Afghanistan-Pakistan war front, which include the following from the Alliance and several of its partnership programs:
NATO members:
- Albania
- Belgium
- Britain
- Bulgaria
- Canada
- Croatia
- The Czech Republic
- Denmark
- Estonia
- France
- Germany
- Greece
- Hungary
- Iceland
- Italy
- Latvia
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- The Netherlands
- Norway
- Poland
- Portugal
- Romania
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Spain
- Turkey
- The United States (35,000 troops with as many more on the way)
Partnership for Peace/Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC):
- Armenia
- Austria
- Azerbaijan
- Bosnia
- Finland
- Georgia
- Ireland
- Macedonia
- Montenegro
- Sweden
- Switzerland (withdrawn last year)
- Ukraine
Contact Countries:
- Australia
- Japan (naval forces)
- New Zealand
- South Korea
Adriatic Charter (overlaps with the Partnership for Peace):
- Albania
- Bosnia
- Croatia
- Macedonia
- Montenegro
Istanbul Cooperation Initiative:
- United Arab Emirates
Trilateral Afghanistan-Pakistan-NATO Military Commission:
- Afghanistan
- Pakistan
- Colombia
- Mongolia
- Singapore
The above roster includes seven of fifteen former Soviet republics (another development worthy of consideration), with Moldova after this year's "Twitter Revolution" and Kazakhstan, where in September the U.S. ambassador pressured the government for troops, candidates for deployments under Partnership for Peace obligations. (Both had earlier sent troops to Iraq.) Their participation would lead to 60% of former Soviet states having troops committed to NATO in Afghanistan. With Moldova added, every European nation (excluding microstates like Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino and Vatican City) except for Belarus, Cyprus, Malta, Russia and Serbia will have military forces serving under NATO in Afghanistan.
Never in the history of world warfare have military contingents from so many nations – fifty or more – served in one war theater. In a single nation. Troops from five continents, Oceania and the Middle East. [3]
Even the putative coalition of the willing stitched together by the U.S. and Britain after the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003 and until troops were pulled for redeployment to Afghanistan only consisted of forces from thirty one nations: The U.S., Britain, Albania, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Japan, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Thailand and Ukraine. Twenty two of those thirty one contributors were former Soviet bloc (Albania remotely) nations or former Yugoslav republics that had recently (1999) joined NATO or were being prepared for integration into or in other manners with the bloc.
The world's last three major wars – those in and against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq – have been used as testing and training grounds for the expansion of global NATO.
The consolidation of an international rapid response (strike) force and occupation army under NATO control was further advanced this week with Obama's troop surge speech on the 1st and follow-up efforts by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen to recruit more allied troops at the recently concluded meeting of NATO (and allied) foreign ministers.
On December 4 "NATO's top official said…that at least 25 countries will send a total of about 7,000 additional forces to Afghanistan next year 'with more to come,' as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to bolster allied resolve." [4] In attendance at the NATO meeting in Brussels were also an unspecified number of foreign ministers of non-NATO nations providing troops for the Afghan war, top military commander of all U.S. and NATO forces General Stanley McChrystal and Afghan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta.
7,000 more NATO troops with "more to come" would, added to some 42,000 non-U.S. soldiers currently serving with NATO and 35,000 U.S. forces doing the same, mean at least 85,000 troops under NATO command even without the 33,000 new U.S. troops headed to Afghanistan. The bloc's largest foreign deployment before this was to Kosovo in 1999 when at its peak the Alliance-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) consisted of 50,000 troops from 39 nations. [5]
The combined U.S. and NATO forces would represent a staggering number, in excess of 150,000 soldiers. By way of comparison, as of September of this year there were approximately 120,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and only a small handful of other nations' personnel, those assigned to the NATO Training Mission – Iraq, remaining with them.
Among NATO member states Italian Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa recently announced an increase of 1,000 troops, bringing the nation's total to almost 4,500, 50% more than had previously been stationed in Iraq.
Poland will send another 600-700 troops which, added to those already in Afghanistan, will constitute the largest aggregate Polish military deployment abroad in the post-Cold War era and the highest number of troops ever deployed outside Europe in the nation's history.
Britain will provide another 500 troops, with its total rising to close to 10,000.
Bulgarian Defense Minister Nikolay Mladenov said last week that "there is a strong possibility that the country will increase its military contingent in Afghanistan." [6] To indicate the nature of the commitments new NATO member states shoulder when they join the Alliance and what their priority then becomes, three days earlier Mladenov, speaking of budgetary constraints placed on the armed forces because of the current financial crisis, affirmed that "We may cut down some other items of the army budget, but there will always be enough money for missions abroad." [7]
Washington has also pressured Croatia, which became a full member of the bloc this past April, to supply more troops and Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor hastened to pledge that "Croatia, being a NATO member, would fulfill its obligations." [8]
The Czech republic's defense minister, Martin Bartak, spoke after the Obama troop surge speech earlier this week and threatened the Czech parliament by stating "it will have to be explained to allies why the Czech Republic does not want to take part in the reinforcements while Slovakia and Britain, for instance, will reinforce their contingents…." [9]
Slovakia has announced that it will more than double its forces in Afghanistan.
The German parliament has just renewed for another year the deployment of the nation's almost 4,500 troops in Afghanistan, the maximum allowed by the Bundestag, although discussions are being held to increase that number to 7,000 after a conference on Afghanistan in London on January 28. German armed forces in the country are engaged in their nation's first ground combat operations since World War II.
A news report on December 3 said that U.S. ambassador to Turkey James Jeffrey was pressuring Ankara to provide a "specific number" of troops and to be ""more flexible" [10] in how they will be deployed, meaning that Turkey must drop so-called combat caveats and engage in active fighting along with its NATO allies.
After meeting with U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden on December 4, Hungarian Prime Minister Gyorgy Gordon Bajnai vowed to send 200 more soldiers to the South Asian war zone, an increase of 60% as Hungary currently has 360 there.
Regarding NATO partner states, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia Celeste Wallander was in Armenia to secure that nation's first military deployment to Afghanistan, the handiwork of NATO's first Special Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia Robert Simmons [11], who has also gained a doubling of troops from neighboring Azerbaijan and a pledge of as many as 1,000 Georgian troops by next year.
During a press conference at NATO headquarters on the first day of the Alliance's recent Afghan war council, December 3, the bloc's chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen expressed gratitude to the United Arab Emirates for dispatching troops to Afghanistan and "hosting…the alliance's International Conference on NATO-UAE Relations and the Way Forward in the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative last October." [12]
The Istanbul Cooperation Initiative was launched at the NATO summit in Turkey in 2004 to upgrade military partnerships with members of the Mediterranean Dialogue (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia) and the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates). [13]
A U.S. military news agency published an article on December 3 that discussed the Quadrennial Defense Review currently being deliberated on at the Pentagon.
Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III, who before assuming that post was Vice President of Government Operations and Strategy for Raytheon, was quoted as boasting that "The Quadrennial Defense Review…will be unlike any other: the first to be driven by current wartime requirements, to balance conventional and nonconventional capabilities, and to embrace a 'whole of government' approach to national security….This is a landmark QDR."
Lynn also said that "Secretary Gates has made clear that the conflicts we're in should be at the very forefront of our agenda. He wants to make sure we're not giving up capabilities needed now for those needed for some unknown future conflict. He wants to make sure the Pentagon is truly on war footing….For the first time in decades, the political and economic stars are aligned for a fundamental overhaul of the way the Pentagon does business." [14]
The more than eight-year war in Afghanistan is not going to end in 2011, Obama's asseverations notwithstanding, nor will it be the last of its kind. It will continue to engulf neighboring Pakistan with the threat of also spilling over into Central Asia and Iran.
The crisis confronting the world is not only the war in South Asia: It is war itself. More particularly, the recklessness of the self-proclaimed sole superpower and the military bloc it heads in arrogating to themselves the exclusive right to threaten nations around the world with military aggression.
If that policy is not brought to an end by the real international community – the more than six-sevenths of humanity outside the greater Euro-Atlantic world (as it deems itself) – Afghanistan will not be this century's last war front but its first and prototypical one. Portents are of even worse to come.
[1]. New York Daily News, December 4, 2009
[2]. New York Times, November 26, 2009
[3]. Afghan War: NATO Builds History's First Global Army, Stop NATO, August 9, 2009, http://tinyurl.com/ykqfb3o
[4]. Associated Press, December 4, 2009
[5]. U.S., NATO Poised For Most Massive War In Afghanistan's History, Stop NATO, September 24, 2009, http://tinyurl.com/yz7m8y9
[6]. Sofia News Agency, November 26, 2009
[7]. Standart News, November 23, 2009
[8]. Xinhua News Agency, December 3, 2009
[9]. Czech News Agency, December 2, 2009
[10]. PanArmenian.net, December 3, 2009
[11]. Mr. Simmons' Mission: NATO Bases From Balkans To Chinese Border, Stop NATO, March 4, 2009, http://tinyurl.com/yh7cqqj
[12]. Emirates News Agency, December 3, 2009
[13]. NATO In Persian Gulf: From Third World War To Istanbul, Stop NATO, February 6, 2009, http://tinyurl.com/ykhckk8
[14]. American Forces Press Service, December 3, 2009


text:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
And I'm Melissa Block.
It's traveled thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean over the last year and now a Japanese fishing vessel that was swept out to sea during the tsunami has been spotted off the coast of British Columbia. It's rusted and drifting and apparently empty. And at more than 150,000 feet long, it's the largest object from the tsunami by far to reach the waters off North America.
Nancy Wallace is keeping a careful eye on that debris. She's director of the Marine Debris Program for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and she joins us now. Nancy, welcome to the program.
NANCY WALLACE: Thanks for having me.
BLOCK: Let's talk first about that squid fishing vessel. What have you been able to find out about it? What kind of shape is it in?
WALLACE: Well, from what we can see in the pictures that we've seen, it's actually in pretty good shape. It's still fairly above the water line and seems to be moving forward, so surprisingly. Considering it's traveled so far, it still looks to be in pretty good shape.
BLOCK: And how far off the Canadian coast is it?
WALLACE: We've received word overnight that it's about 85 nautical miles off of the Queen Charlotte Islands.
BLOCK: And is it headed straight for shore?
WALLACE: No, not necessarily. It's adrift right now, so really depends a lot on the wind and currents. So, we don't think it's actually going to make landfall anytime soon.
BLOCK: Well, what happens with a vessel like this that's abandoned out at sea, nobody on it? Do you try to get the owner? What happens?
WALLACE: Well, the Canadian Coast Guard is in charge of the situation because it is in Canadian waters. They have reached out to the owner in Japan. The Japanese government was able to track down the owner and identify where the ship came from and also confirmed that they don't believe anybody was onboard.
BLOCK: So, what happens with the vessel itself?
WALLACE: Well, that will be up to the Coast Guard. I think there are some options there in terms of either, you know, being able to bring it into shore through a tugboat or actually even considering - sometimes, those vessels are scuttled at sea, so they're actually sunk to make sure that there isn't any impact on land.
BLOCK: Uh-huh. Now, would you be worried about a pollution hazard, maybe fuel leaks?
WALLACE: Yes. That is absolutely something to consider and that's - again, the Coast Guard is looking into that to determine if there is fuel onboard and, of course, that would be addressed before any decision is made about what to do with the vessel.
BLOCK: There were tons of debris that were swept away in the tsunami last year. You're director of the Marine Debris Program, is this something that you've been kind of tracking, wondering what's going to be washing ashore and when?
WALLACE: Absolutely. This is something that we have been engaged with since the beginning. Of course, you know, this is, first and foremost, a human tragedy. But pretty quickly, we started to think about the amount of debris that went into the water. So we reached out to the commercial shipping industry, to the fishing industry, and said, look out for debris. Let us know what you're seeing.
After the event and for a few weeks, you could actually see a debris field by satellite, but then it broke up so much or sunk that it wasn't visible anymore by satellites. So we've been, you know, doing a lot through observations and then also looking in terms of modeling. And we did some initial models that forecast where the debris could go.
It's been a year since the event and we actually have real data now. You know, we had forecasts with historical data before, but now we have actual wind and current data that we can put into the models. And what we're seeing is actually an anticipated timeline of when that debris could arrive on our coastlines.
BLOCK: When you use the models that you've put together, would you expect to be seeing a whole lot of debris from the tsunami arriving on North American shores all at once? Will it be coming in slowly, over time?
WALLACE: We actually think it'll be coming in slowly, over time because debris is made up of different things. So, things that sit out of the water or have, like, a high sail area are going to be more influenced by wind. And so, those may move quicker and arrive more quickly along the West Coast or Alaska.
But we also have things in the water that are probably half submerged or totally submerged that are going to move a lot slower. So we think that the influx of debris will be scattered over time. And it also probably will be scattered over geographic location. So there probably won't be a big influx of debris all in one place at one time, but it'll come in more slowly and spread out.
BLOCK: Nancy Wallace, thanks for talking to us.
WALLACE: OK. Thanks very much.
BLOCK: Nancy Wallace is director of the Marine Debris Program for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.


text:
As many of you know, Zakk Wylde is the victim ... er, guest of honor at Guitar World's very first Rock and Roll Roast tonight (Thursday) in Anaheim, California. Zakk will endure tongue-lashing from Ozzy Osbourne, Jim Florentine, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Brian Posehn, Corey Taylor, Chris Jericho, Jim Breuer and more, all at the hands of roastmaster Sharon Osbourne.
But how does Zakk Wylde feel about all this? Artist Direct recently caught up with the man himself to find out what he expects from tomorrow night. A couple of excerpts follow.
On being approached about the roast: "I'm good buddies with all of the guys over at Guitar World, and I remember talking to Brad Tolinski [editor-in-chief] about it. I mentioned I wanted to do a 'Black Label Roast.' I was watching the Dean Martin Roasts one day, and I thought, 'I ought to start doing these 'Black Label Roasts' where we take the piss out of all of our friends.' Dean Martin would have everybody on that thing, and they'd be getting destroyed [Laughs]. With cast of characters I know, I figured it'd be hysterical. Everybody knows everyone else too in rock. Brad came back to me and said they're going to do these Guitar World Rock & Roll Roasts, considering you were talking about doing those 'Black Label Roasts' and it was your idea, you're the first one we're going to destroy! I said, 'Awesome, sounds good!' That's how that came about. The more brutal it is, the funnier it is, dude."
On what dirt the roasters have on him: "Obviously with Mom [Sharon Osbourne], Mrs. O doing the roasting, it's going to be hysterical. Then you've got Stone Cold, Father Jericho, who will be awesome. Father Shatner is coming down for this as well. I can only imagine how ridiculously stupid this thing is going to be. That's what we want, man. Corey Taylor's awesome, and he'll come up with some ridiculously goofy ass shit to say."
You can read more here.


text:
Not every previous Fraser post is about my personal ancestors. And neither is most of this one. As background, my buddy Lizzie and I have a common ancestor, one Duncan Fraser (c1783-1867), a blacksmith in Killin, Perthshire. Three of Duncan's sons were William Fraser, MD (1810-1872), my ancestor John Fraser (1808-????) and her ancestor Donald Fraser (1819-1880). We have a theory that two other sons may have followed their older brothers to Canada.
Another mystery is the identity of a Fraser witness at the 19 June 1800 marriage in Montreal of John Charles and Lucille LeBrun (Fraser blog 30 April 2008). Their daughter Miranda Charles later married Dr. William Fraser in 1840. But who was the Fraser in Montreal in 1800? The signature is very difficult to read, with the first name abbreviated. It begins with Eli ..., seeming to be Elisth. Certainly there were plenty of Scots in Montreal at the time, in the fur trade and other mercantile ventures.
Hence a few reasons for browsing the Drouin collection on Ancestry.ca looking for Fraser marriages (knowing full well that, at present, the database is incomplete for Protestant registers in Quebec). This session did not produce likely-looking results for me, but I did stumble across an intriguing tangent.
At Notre Dame Basilica in Quebec City on 24 October 1842, John Fraser Esq. [Ecuyer], notary of Terrebonne parish, married Dlle. [Demoiselle] Elizabeth Fraser of Quebec parish.(1) Some will get a chuckle that the groom's surname was indexed in the database as Ecuyer and the bride as Della Elizabeth. I hear moans about outsourcing the indexing. Someone looking for this John Fraser would have a hard time finding him!
The genealogical lore in the entry is fascinating. The impressive parade of witnesses gives definite family clues, merely needing untangling:
* The Hon. John Malcolm Fraser and Hon. John Fraser, uncles
* Henry (G.) Forsyth, cousin
* Louis Marteau, Esq.
* Simon Eliot Fraser, brother
* Magdaline Fraser, sister
* Andrew R. Fraser, cousin
It's unclear whether each relationship applies to the bride or groom. Moreover, the Bishop of Quebec gave two dispensations for (a) the publishing of banns and (b) second degree of consanguinity—the latter commonly indicating the parties are first cousins (having mutual grandparents) or perhaps uncle and niece.
Such a rich Fraser cornucopia deserved at least a cursory Internet search. Since the two Honourables looked promising, I first looked at the website of the Quebec National Assembly (NAQ) www.assnat.qc.ca/eng/index.html, which has a list of all elected representatives over the years. Hon. John Malcolm Fraser (c1800-1860) was born at Malbaie, son of Malcolm Fraser and his mistress Marguerite Ducros dit Laterreur. John Malcolm inherited part of his father's Mount Murray estate in 1815 and became a leading figure in Quebec City commerce and politics. In 1827 he married Grace Forsyth, daughter of another Quebec merchant, Henry George Forsyth, originally from Aberdeen, Scotland, in Quebec City's Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral. Names of their children are not mentioned, but clearly they would have some Forsyth cousins.
The NAQ site also had an entry for Hon. John Fraser de Berry. Born at Laval 25 November 1816, he was the son of Simon Fraser (a doctor with the 42nd Regiment of Royal Highlanders or Black Watch); died 15 November 1876. John "Fraser de Berry's" brief bio includes his early studies at Terrebonne and Montreal, with admission to the practice of notary in 1839. He was also prominent in various provincial and other appointments. In the mid-1860s he assumed the de Berry name of his Norman ancestors. He married his cousin Elizabeth Fraser in Notre-Dame-de-Québec parish on 24 October 1842. Aha. This must be our groom.
Next I searched Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB) http://www.biographi.ca/. The only relevant Fraser seemed to be a Malcom Fraser (1733-1815) who had a son John Malcom (with no entry in DCB). According to the DCB historian, Malcolm was born in Abernethy, Perthshire, Scotland. After Malcolm's service in Nova Scotia and Quebec with the 78th Foot regiment (Fraser Highlanders), he retired as a lieutenant and acquired the seigneury of Mount-Murray, Quebec, within the former Malbaie seigneury. In his lifetime he became a large landowner in several areas of Quebec. Of numerous children by two women, three of the sons are named as Simon, Joseph and John Malcolm. The latter looks like the same man who married Grace Forsyth.
Was I getting somewhere? Not leaving well enough alone, I found a delicious potpourri of John Fraser de Berry information on the Clan Fraser Society of Canada website http://www.clanfraser.ca/fraserde.htm. The editor of the piece declares, "John Fraser de Berry spent a lifetime inventing and reinventing his ancestry and genealogy, as evidenced by the following examples from published sources in Quebec." Then ensues an editorial dissection of various descriptions written by or about the man—autobiographical accounts and obituaries. One of his greatest goals was to revive and head the "New Clan Fraser," considering all the former Fraser Highlanders who had settled in Quebec. Fraser de Berry was well known for claiming descent from Lord Lovat (Simon Fraser the Jacobite) and being the 58th descendant of Jules de Berry who lived in France in the eighth century AD.
The clan foundational meeting in 1868 and the chief's impressive lineage prompted a number of humourous letters to The Quebec Morning Chronicle. Separating what appear to be facts from the hogwash, we find that neither John's father (Simon, 1768-1844) nor grandfather (Malcom, 1733-1815) had any descent at all from Lord Lovat, whose direct line ended with his own execution in 1747. Fraser de Berry adroitly concealed two generations of illegitimacy in his true pedigree. Historians have discounted the de Berry encounter with Charlemagne's court as fable. Nevertheless, Fraser de Berry was Seigneur of Contrecoeur and Cournoyer, a longtime convert to Catholicism, fluently bilingual and counsel for the Quebec Legislative Assembly when he died. His vision of the clan model laid the foundation for the Clan Fraser Society of Canada.
One tangent leads to another. This is what happens to genealogists. It began as a lazy-day exercise and look where it took me. Have I almost forgotten de Berry's wife Elizabeth Fraser? Elizabeth's obituary in 1901, quoted on the Clan Fraser website, mentions only a brother William. It seems mutual grandfather Malcolm had five sons: Alexander, Joseph, Simon, William and John Malcolm (no attempt at birth order here). The bride Elizabeth may be the daughter of Alexander, who purportedly had an Elizabeth, William and Madeleine among his children. Thus the Hon. John Malcolm Fraser was the paternal uncle of both bride and groom while the second uncle John is still a puzzle. It will take far more than Internet browsing to untangle and reconstruct these families. If what we see so far is even trustworthy!
(1) Fraser-Fraser marriage, 1842, Notre Dame Basilica register, Quebec City, no. 151, p. 204, "Drouin Collection," digital image, Ancestry.ca (www.ancestry.ca : accessed 1 April 2009).
22 April 2009
10 April 2009
What Comes With Spring?
The busy season is here. Spring genealogy seminars and conferences have already begun. Planning for them never ends. Everyone I know is doing three or four jobs. Meetings, tasks, thinking, details, memos, reminders, copious amounts of paper being generated, tons of emails and even worse, phone calls.
I needed a camel photograph to calm me down. And keep in touch with my blog.
What a handsome fellow. See you? at the annual Ontario Genealogical Society Conference 29-31 May at Sheridan College in Oakville.
Neil Carey, photographer, fohn.net, "Camel Pictures and Interesting Facts," (http://fohn.net/camel-pictures-facts/#arabian).
I needed a camel photograph to calm me down. And keep in touch with my blog.
What a handsome fellow. See you? at the annual Ontario Genealogical Society Conference 29-31 May at Sheridan College in Oakville.
Neil Carey, photographer, fohn.net, "Camel Pictures and Interesting Facts," (http://fohn.net/camel-pictures-facts/#arabian).
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The City of Waconia bills for all utility charges on a monthly basis. Bills are normally sent out via regular mail or email on the last day of the month being billed. The due date for the billing is on or about the 21st of the following month.
Why is my bill higher than usual?
The accuracy of the city's water meters is +/-2% of 100%. If you should experience an unusually high usage on your monthly bill, it could indicate some type of leak in your plumbing. We recommend that you first compare the reading on your bill with the current reading on your meter. The reading on your meter should be slightly higher than the billing, depending on the amount of time that has passed since the reading and how much water you normally use.
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oftentimes, running toilets are identified as the problem. You cannot always hear or see a toilet that is running and may result in significant usage. You can check your toilets for leaks by putting food coloring into the tank. If there is a leak, the food coloring will show up in the bowl.
Another source of high usage is a water softener, which may be leaking or regenerating improperly. To check your water softener, take a water meter reading before you retire for the evening. Take another reading in the morning, before any water is used. Any difference in the readings should be the result of the water used to regenerate your softener. Repeat this procedure for a week or 2 to check the consistency of the usage. This will verify how often the softener is regenerating. It should not be regenerating every night. If you believe the amount of water used is too high, or that your softener is regenerating too frequently, check with your manufacturer or dealer for proper usage and instructions on how to correct the problem.
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All properties will receive a minimum service charge billing on a monthly basis. The city's base rates are defined in the city's fee schedule (Ordinance 1100).
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