Reader’s Links on February 6, 2018

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About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

124 Replies to “Reader’s Links on February 6, 2018”

  1. Suspected militants storm Kashmir hospital to free prisoner (BBC, Feb 6, 2018)
    http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-42956313

    “Gunmen have stormed a hospital in Indian-administered Kashmir, escaping with a high-profile Pakistani prisoner who was undergoing a medical check-up.

    Two Indian police officers have been killed in the attack on Tuesday. No civilians or hospital staff were injured.

    Police said a manhunt has been launched for the prisoner, Naveed Jutt, who has been in Indian custody since 2014.

    Jutt is a former commander in the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group.

    Police told the BBC that Jutt was one of six prisoners who had been taken to the Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital in Srinagar, the state capital, for a medical examination.

    He was the only Pakistani national in the group…”

  2. SVP pushes ahead with plans to analyse asylum seeker phones (thelocal, Feb 6, 2018)
    https://www.thelocal.ch/20180206/switzerland-svp-pushes-ahead-with-plans-to-analyse-asylum-seeker-phones

    “A Swiss National Council committee has come out in support of a parliamentary initiative put forward by the country’s right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP) that would allow the electronic devices of asylum seekers to be checked for evidence of their identity.

    Around 20,000 asylum seekers arrived in Switzerland without passports or other official identity documents in 2016. This makes the task of verifying their identity or country of origin difficult.

    The SVP believes accessing the mobile phones, tablets and laptops could aid in this process and it has now won the backing of a lower house parliamentary committee which supported the move with 17 votes in favour and seven against.

    “I am relieved. Anyone who is being followed, and is risking life and limb has no legitimate reason not to reveal their identity to the state that is offering them asylum,” said SVP national councillor Gregor Rutz, who initially put forward the proposal.

    Explaining how the measure could work, Rutz told Swiss tabloid Blick that anyone who claimed they were Somalian but made a lot of calls to the Ivory Coast was giving probably giving up information about their real origin…”

  3. REVEALED: British Government Promotes ‘Liberation’ of Hijab at London Event, Avoids Commenting for A Week (breitbart, Feb 6, 2018)
    http://www.breitbart.com/london/2018/02/06/revealed-britains-foreign-office-promotes-world-hijab-day-attempts-to-avoid-public-disclosure-of-staff-event/

    “The Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom (FCO) has promoted the wearing of the Islamic veil amongst its London staff, using the February 1st occasion of “World Hijab Day” to promote the head covering and even issue “free scarves” to those who chose to try it…”

  4. Police Officer Working to Deport Illegals Threatened at Home by Muslim Extremists (breitbart, Feb 6, 2018)
    http://www.breitbart.com/london/2018/02/06/radical-islamic-extremists-threaten-police-officer-involved-deportations/

    “A pair of Islamic extremists confronted a police officer in the German region of North Rhine-Westphalia in front of his apartment to intimidate him because he is involved in deportations.

    The unnamed officer is said to be a member of the Federal German police force which is responsible for border security in the country. The two men, described as belonging to the radical Islamic scene, threatened the officer who was forced to flee to his home where his dog confronted the men, barked and caused them to flee, Focus reports.

    While the incident occurred on January 26th, the information was only recently released to the public. Officials say the two men approached in a Mercedes-Benz S-class vehicle, were wearing long beards and traditional conservative Islamic clothing.

    Two days before the threats, the officer had been involved with the deportation of 19 failed Afghan asylum seekers who were returned to Kabul.

    The report is the first instance known of Islamic radicals attempting to threaten and harass police officers involved in the deportation process but not the first time Islamic radicals have clashed with German police…”

  5. rmy Kicks Off Raising Of 2nd Division Of 90,274 Soldiers Under China Specific Mountain Strike Corps

    • Army Kicks Off Raising Of 2nd Division Of 90,274 Soldiers Under China Specific Mountain Strike Corps

      Paging India to the Red courtesy phone.

      Before this gets ugly, things are going to have to get a whole lot more uglier.

      • 400 tanks to the border with Pakistan, 90,000 mountain troops to the border with China, military bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

        The EU giving Eastern Europe until June to surrender or military force will be used.

        Ugly, much uglier and grossly ugly and coming down the road at a dead run. They are looking for and may have found racing motorcycles by now so they can speed up.

      • India has periodic border wars with China. Yet they continue to be top trading partners.
        NEVER has the fact that both are nuclear-armed nations entered the equation.
        India’s economy could fit into a thimble of China’s. Even if/ when China goes bust.

  6. Afghan Woman’s Beating Exposes Consequences Of Using Militia For Security

    For the remote Afghan village of Rubat Hamidudin, the weekend arrest of seven men for publicly beating an alleged adulteress was a historic event.

    The operation by Afghan National Police in the northeastern province of Takhar marked the first time since King Zahir Shah’s reign ended in 1973 that police from any Afghan central government have been to the village.

    Authorities say the case illustrates the difficulty Kabul faces as the government tries to provide security and a system of criminal justice in Afghanistan’s remote regions.

    “Even though the area is under the control of the government, not even a single officer from the Afghan National Police had ever gone there before,” Sonatollah Teymour, the spokesman for Takhar’s provincial governor, told RFE/RL’s Radio Free Afghanistan on February 5.

    “It’s the first time police have gone to this village since the reign of King Zahir Shah,” Teymour confirmed. “Most of the people in this village have just witnessed a police operation for the first time in their lives.”

    Shocking Video

    The case came to light on February 2 after a video emerged in which a group of men can be seen carrying out the beating of a woman in defense of family honor. The video shows a burqa-clad 22-year-old woman being beaten with tree branches by multiple men, identified as her father-in-law, her brother, and her uncles.

    Teymour told RFE/RL that all of the men are supporters of a “local commander” in Takhar’s Chah Ab District — a warlord who is a relative of the women and was present during her beating.

    Warlord militias have been tolerated by Kabul for years, and even funded by the U.S. military since 2007, under a controversial NATO-backed plan that serves as a stopgap measure for providing local protection while Kabul focuses its security resources on fighting the Taliban elsewhere.

    All law enforcement activities in Takhar Province are supposed to be handled by the Afghan National Police and Afghan Border Police posted along the province’s northern frontier with Tajikistan.

    But Teymour admitted that those Interior Ministry forces, commanded by a police chief in the provincial capital of Taloqan, are inadequate for covering Takhar’s vast mountainous territory.

    “This place is situated very far from the center of the province,” Teymour told RFE/RL about the village. “The whole province has 2,700 police officers and we cannot send them to all of the remote villages of the province.”

    Witnesses claim the woman beaten in the video was being punished at the orders of local clerics who decided she was guilty of having an extramarital affair while her husband was away in Iran.

    They said the evidence presented against the unidentified woman was that she spent three hours alone in her home with a 17-year-old boy. She survived the attack.

    Claims about a cleric-run kangaroo court in the village are now being investigated by a team from the Interior Ministry and Afghanistan’s Independent Directorate of Local Governance (IDLG) — a branch of the Afghan government that reports directly to the presidency.

    IDLG spokesperson Munira Yusufzada said that even with Kabul’s attention focused on the case, and even though the incident happened in a “secure region,” the joint probe will “take some time” because the village of Rubat Hamidudin is so remote.

    “We will secure justice for the woman,” Yusufzada vowed.

    Lawmakers from the region have said the beating was not reported to government authorities for more than 45 days, and only then after it emerged on social media, because some people wanted to keep it secret.

    “All local government departments are active there, but I do not know why this incident remained secret and why the victim has not reported the issue to government,” said Maryam Kofi, a parliamentary deputy from Takhar.

    Community Level ‘Justice’

    Complaints registered by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) since the start of 2017 show that the incident was not an isolated case of an alleged kangaroo court operating in government-controlled territory.

    The AIHRC has registered six complaints about such judgments against women and girls in different parts of Afghanistan during the last 10 months.

    Meanwhile, the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), a government-funded independent research organization based in Kabul, has warned that widespread corruption in local branches of the justice system has resulted in many cases being resolved “at the community level, since doing so is cheaper, faster, and more transparent.”

    “Community-based dispute resolution is based on customary law intermixed with Shari’a law,” an AREU ground-view study on local governance concluded.

    But the practice leaves “questions over human rights and the treatment of women,” it said.

    The AREU also has warned that the shortcomings of Afghanistan’s formal justice system in remote areas — such as time taken for rulings, distance, complexity, expense, and corruption — are “major factors cited for the loss of trust” in Afghanistan’s central government.

    “Significantly, the Taliban seek to control justice mechanisms as their first priority after securing control on an area,” the AREU concluded.

    The Taliban has never secured its presence in the mountainous area around Rubat Hamidudin — even in 2001 when the Taliban controlled 90 percent of Afghanistan.

    The village is located in the small swath of territory the Taliban never conquered — the area where the legendary anti-Taliban military commander Ahmad Shah Masud located his headquarters before he was assassinated by two Al-Qaeda suicide bombers on September 9, 2001.

    Analysts say the influence of anti-Taliban militia governance in such areas today, while having a positive short-term impact on security, can have a negative long-term influence that undermines the intentions of Afghanistan’s central government and U.S.-led coalition forces.

    Teymour told RFE/RL that the Afghan government “cannot guarantee that the same situation won’t happen again” around Rubat Hamidudin.

    Out of concern for the safety of the woman who was beaten in the video, Teymour told RFE/RL she was moved to a “safe house” shelter in Taloqan late on February 4.

    “Although there is no doubt that she is suffering from the ordeal that she has experienced, doctors say her health is good and she appears to be in good physical condition,” Teymour said.

    https://www.rferl.org/a/afghanistan-woman-beating-tarkhan-province/29023420.html

    • Mob Beats Afghan Woman For Alleged Affair

      Witnesses have claimed that the 22-year-old woman was being punished at the order of local clerics, who had decided she was guilty of having an extramarital affair while her husband was away in Iran.

      Sonatollah Teymour, the spokesman of Takhar’s governor, told RFE/RL’s Radio Free Afghanistan that relatives had found the woman alone with a 17-year-old boy.

      “A young man had entered the woman’s house and he had been there for three hours,” Teymour said. “The relatives found out and discovered the woman and the boy alone.”

      https://www.rferl.org/a/afghanistan-women-brutally-beaten-affair/29015213.html